Name: Dockter, Docktor, Dokta, Tudock, Dave?

[Nokome Bentley]

The current name of this tool is Dockter. It's a portmanteau of doctor (either the medical or PhD kind) and Docker (the container platform) because it's aim is to make it easier for researchers (either the medical or PhD kind 🙂 ) to create Docker containers.

But there are five issues with the name:

• 🗣️ Hard to distinguish in verbal communications: "Was that Docker or Dockter?"
• ✍️ Ambiguity in spelling: "Dockter" or "Docktor"?
• 🖥️ Confusion at the command line: dockter build . is very similar docker build . and looking for that extra t can consume an extra brain cycle or two to figure out which tool you are using.
• 💻 Autocomplete at the command line: many people use autocomplete in the shell and having the first four letters the same makes this less useful.

As the famous joke says (well actually a riff on the original joke):

There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
Leon Bambrick

Please add your thoughts and suggestions in comments below 🙏. If you like someone's suggested name please 👍 it

[Giorgio Sironi]

I agree a problem with dockter is not being specific enough to be unique in searches:

It also appears to be in use in some other projects as a pun.

[Ben Shaw]

I like Dokta. It seems to be in use in the musical world but not in software.

[Aleksandra Pawlik]

+1 for Dokta from me too.

[Nokome Bentley]

Pinging @finlay for his vote :)

[Finlay Thompson]

dokta works for me too. lower case though, right ?

[Nokome Bentley]

Yep dokta at the command line

[Tim van Mourik]

Taking a tweet a bit too seriously here 😎
My two suggestions are: “Docker Who” or, as I’m a big fan of recursive animal acronyms, something like “Dodo: DOdo makes DOcker images”!

[Nokome Bentley]

Thanks for the suggests @TimVanMourik ! My concerns though are:

• dockerwho (funny as it is) is quite long to have to type at the command line 👾
• dodo is nice, but also implies this tool might go extinct soon 🙂

[Tim van Mourik]

• Haha, without necessarily advocating dockerwho, my general rule is: "No programmer has ever spent more time on typing than on thinking about what to type," so I tend to advocate expressive variable names. And then anything below 10 chars is not too long, IMO, especially with autocomplete. But I totally understand that it is a bit too funny and not quite conveying the professional impression that you'd like.
• And sure, if you don't wanna jinx your tool with calling it dodo, by all means.

Suggestion: If the coin lands on dokta, give the function a 'who' argument that is an alias of 'help' 😎

[Nokome Bentley]

Oooh, I really like the who argument suggestion (@TimVanMourik, you should be a CLUX (command line user experience ) designer!)

But how about we leverage the fact that we generate a JSON-LD document with all the software requirements for a project...including their authors. The who subcommand could be a "standing on the shoulders of giants" list of the authors of the current project (if available) and all of the software packages it relies on. e.g.

$ dockter who
Roger Bivand (rgdal, sp), Tim Keitt (rgdal), Barry Rowlingson (rgdal), Edzer Pebesma (sp)

Which for reference is based on filtering the .environ.jsonld file for one of our test fixtures

jq '.softwareRequirements[0].softwareRequirements[] | .author[] | .name' tests/fixtures/r-spatial/.environ.jsonld

[Tim van Mourik]

Thanks, haha, this I leave to you. Personally I feel that the spirit of Doctor Who is that you never learn the name but that (s)he is always there to help, but this is indeed a nice way to credit contributors.

[Aleksandra Pawlik]

Many thanks to everyone for your comments and feedback. And the winner is:
dockter !
I am closing this issue for now but thanks to @TimVanMourik we are planning to add dockter who command (see #55)