Rename package to FixedPointNumbers.jl?

[timholy]

I wonder if there might be some potential for confusion with the notion of a fixed point of a function.

[timholy]

It wouldn't be bad to give a verdict on this, if other packages are about to start depending on it.

[JeffBezanson]

Yes! The name of the abstract type should really be FixedPoint in analogy to FloatingPoint. Confusion with other uses of "fixed point" is also a valid concern. I think we should rename it.

[timholy]

Great. Since this is in your personal GitHub account, I'll need to ask you to do the dirty work.

[JeffBezanson]

Maybe while I'm at it I should move this to the JuliaLang organization?

[timholy]

Up to you. (I'm not sure I'd be able to rename it there either.) I imagine it's useful for you to have a package or two of your own...besides Julia, that is 😄. I know Jameson commented that he thought it was informative to keep his pulse on the process of package maintenance and development.

[JeffBezanson]

Yes, I agree it's helpful to serve as a package maintainer myself, even if for just 1 package :)

I believe the way to rename packages is just to make a new package and copy everything over, then deprecate/remove the old one. @StefanKarpinski is that right?

[timholy]

I think if you click the Settings icon, the top part of the page is for renaming the GitHub repository. Then if you clone it you can tweak filenames and module names (also the .travis.yml file). That may be easier than recreating it.

As for registering it in METADATA, dunno. I kind of expect that it will be easier to create a new package, but I'd defer to @StefanKarpinski.

[kmsquire]

Was just exploring this (following the breadcrumbs from JuliaImages/Images.jl#135).

Since no other official* packages depend on this package yet, renaming in METADATA is probably okay. The main consequence is that anyone who has the package installed will suddenly have an FixedPoint unregistered package installed.

If you wanted to be nice, you could make FixedPoint depend on FixedPointNumbers and have the FixedPoint repo point to a branch commit which just printed a warning and/or included FixedPointNumbers. They could even point to the same repo (which is what would happen if you renamed this one). But I'm not sure that's necessary.

Cc: @IainNZ for another opinion.

* I doubt many people have set up the infrastructure necessary for unofficial package repos at this point.

[IainNZ]

Best thing to do would be to make a new entry in METADATA, update URL in FixedPoint to new URL, and change the requires for FixedPoint to julia 0.2 0.3 which would essentially stop any one from installing it from next week onwards.

[JeffBezanson]

Thanks Iain, I've followed your advice. Hope I didn't screw anything up.

Fixed in a1b6fca.

[timholy]

Great, thanks Jeff!

[StefanKarpinski]

Sorry for my lack of input on this – it appears to have been resolved smoothly.

[StefanKarpinski]

Btw, I just discovered that gmail has been sending a significant number of my github notifications to spam. I appear to have missed a number of discussions and I'm pretty annoyed about it.