[Ganglia-developers] ganglia cookbook repository name

[Ben H. <ga...@gr...>]

Hi folks,

The process towards the ganglia team having ownership over the default
ganglia chef cookbook is proceeding well.  I have a dilemma I'd like your
help solving.

There is a strong preference in the Chef community towards having the name
of the github repo containing a cookbook be the same as the name of the
cookbook, as well as a strong preference towards having the name of a
cookbook being the same as the name of the software it configures.

For example, the popular web server nginx is configured by a cookbook named
nginx in a repository named nginx:
https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/nginx. This extends so far as to
assert that when downloading the cookbook from the community site directly
(eg http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/nginx) the directory in the
tarball must be named the same as the cookbook. When organizing your chef
cookbooks, they live in a directory structure that matches the name of the
cookbooks; eg chef/cookbooks/nginx/.

This doesn't mix terribly well with organizations that host cookbooks for
configuring their own product. The elasticsearch folks, for example, buck
this trend and name the repository cookbook-elasticsearch. While some tools
understand this, at other times you have to manually rename it to just
'elasticsearch' (the name of the cookbook) before you can use it.

It's understandable why they did this thing, if you go to
http://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch, what you find is the actual
elasticsearch product.  This makes perfect sense, and is what you would
expect when you come at it from the perspective of some random person
looking at github.

My dilemma: from the perspective of a chef user, we should name the
repository 'ganglia'.  From the perspective of github, we should name it
'ganglia-cookbook' (or its current name, 'chef-ganglia').

We're in the unique position that this choice is not forced; we don't
currently have a repository named 'ganglia', since the main ganglia
codebase lives in monitor-core.

If the repo name was the only piece of information presented to a person
browsing repositories on github, the choice would be much simpler. The
presence of the repo byline ("A chef cookbook for installing and
configuring ganglia") makes it pretty clear what the repo contains
regardless of its name. This byline makes it reasonable to me to name the
repo just 'ganglia' instead of 'ganglia-cookbook' or something like that.

So, who's got opinions?

Please vote! Weak/Strong Support/Oppose/Don't Care:
* ganglia
* chef-ganglia
* ganglia-cookbook
* write-in alternative

-ben