RFC: TortoiseBzr strategies

[raindog at macrohmasheen.com]

Hollerith cards are bad pr. What did nazi's use to track prisoners? Hollerith cards, which I think is their most famous (notorious?) usage.
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-----Original Message-----
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>

Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 03:39:21 
To:Nicholas Allen <allen at ableton.com>
Cc:Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net>, bazaar at lists.canonical.com
Subject: Re: RFC: TortoiseBzr strategies


Nicholas Allen writes:

 > I don't get the tortoise thing anyway. Why on earth would anyone want 
 > their product to be associated with something slow?

Because open source is, well, open to having a sense of humor?  And,
hey, I don't see any safes running the 100m dash in the Olympics.
They're heavy and tedious to get stuff out of, even for the owner
... hm, does that sound like any products you know?

I think the point here is that the tortoise has a shell (a pun), and
is heavily armored against accidents, which is what revctrl is all
about.  A good logo (eg, a running tortoise handing out stacks of
hollerith cards -- more humor!)

The big problem is that if bzr's performance issues don't get fixed
quickly, people *will* say "Tortoise -- how apropos!" and that *will*
be hard to shake.

 > How about something like VisualBazaar?

I think the association with the various ickinesses of Microsoft
Visual* products (not to mention the association with Microsoft) makes
that a hard sell to open source developers.

 > Another idea I had was BEE (Bazaar Exprorer Extension). The logo
 > could then be a bee of course...

A bee in a cherry blossom, please.  The connotations of
"cross-pollination" (yes, I heard Mark Shuttleworth talk earlier this
week ;-) and "cherry-picking" are definitely good here.

Still, I'd stick with Tortoise.  Tortoise*, like the term or not, is
very well-known and deservedly popular.  I'd be more concerned with
fidelity to the Tortoise UI and whether TortoiseBzr "infringes their
trademark", so to speak.