I understand and respect your choice here. For the record, I think "toolbox" was a great name, and at the same time understand how not being "googleable" enough can seem to be a problem for a project in its infancy. Yet Go manages somehow, and R survives by the skin of its teeth.

Only to supply some anecdata now that some time has passed: a web search with the keywords "podman toolbox" located this repository straight away. I continue to see this tool referred to pretty consistently as "toolbox" in new blog posts (e.g.) on gnome.org and in the GNOME Discourse. The package to install in Debian and thus Ubuntu is still podman-toolbox and its man page (also toolbox) makes no mention of the new name.

Perhaps the pressure from "more and more people" to rename the project was unfounded. A vocal minority can make things very uncomfortable for an open source maintainer, though, I get that.

I believe, in order to go about this wholeheartedly:

• the name of the GitHub repository ought to be changed, which I see you mentioned in 45a9b40.
• for the sake of your Debian/Ubuntu counterparts, someone (maybe me!) would need to work with the Debian maintainers to rename the relevant packages and update the man pages.
  • I don't use other distros frequently, but I imagine Arch, to some extent, openSUSE variants, and any other distributions who packaged toolbx as toolbox will experience similar discomfort for a while. It's happened before, and it'll happen again.
• a blog post similar to Carlos Garnacho's about the renaming of Tracker-related projects might also help get the word out in the community, so that people will start using the new and correct name for the project.

On a side note, the domain name toolbx.org appears to be available.

I also found myself at containers/toolbox#1399 because I was confused whether "toolbox" and "toolbx" were even the same project, and the README doesn't make any statement about that. Edit: I have done a documentation PR for that as well.

I believe, in order to go about this wholeheartedly:

the name of the GitHub repository ought to be changed, which I see you mentioned in 45a9b40.

for the sake of your Debian/Ubuntu counterparts, someone (maybe me!) would need to work with the Debian maintainers to rename the relevant packages and update the man pages.

I don't use other distros frequently, but I imagine Arch, to some extent, openSUSE variants, and any other distributions who packaged toolbx as toolbox will experience similar discomfort for a while. It's happened before, and it'll happen again.

I always felt that we should switch the name of the binary, the release tarballs and the Git repository in one step, because they seem so tightly tied together. The problem is that first step, because changing the name of the binary has backwards compatibility concerns.

Existing containers rely on the toolbox(1) binary on the host, because it's bind mounted into the containers at /usr/bin/toolbox. I wonder if we can hack something up using links and the fact that /run/host is a thing.

a blog post similar to Carlos Garnacho's about the renaming of Tracker-related projects might also help get the word out in the community, so that people will start using the new and correct name for the project.

I already did that. For some people the name toolbox was too familiar and toolbx wasn't a big enough change, so they tend to keep using, and we have added to the problem by not renaming the binary. :)

On a side note, the domain name toolbx.org appears to be available.

Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out.

By the way, please feel free to open pull requests adding articles about Toolbx to containertoolbx.org/articles.

I understand and respect your choice here. For the record, I think "toolbox" was a great name, and at the same time understand how not being "googleable" enough can seem to be a problem for a project in its infancy. Yet Go manages somehow, and R survives by the skin of its teeth.

Only to supply some anecdata now that some time has passed: a web search with the keywords "podman toolbox" located this repository straight away. I continue to see this tool referred to pretty consistently as "toolbox" in new blog posts (e.g.) on gnome.org and in the GNOME Discourse. The package to install in Debian and thus Ubuntu is still podman-toolbox and its man page (also toolbox) makes no mention of the new name.

Perhaps the pressure from "more and more people" to rename the project was unfounded. A vocal minority can make things very uncomfortable for an open source maintainer, though, I get that.

The straw that broke the camel's back was the existence of github.com/coreos/toolbox, which used to have an 81 line Bash script called toolbox. For various reasons, one distribution started packaging this project even when Toolbx was a lot more popular as toolbox, and it took some effort to convince them to switch their toolbox package to ship Toolbx.

This wasn't the first time someone had an alternate implementation of the toolbox idea that was called some variant of toolbox. Another one was coretoolbox, and several ideas in Toolbx originated from there. However, it was the first time a distribution started packaging one of those as toolbox.

It made us realize that we need to further raise the profile of Toolbx (back then Toolbox) by having a website other than the Git repository for the code, and presence on Matrix, X (back then Twitter) and Mastodon. That led to the realization that it’s impossible to find any decent Internet real estate with anything called toolbox.

In the spring and early summer of 2018, some of us in the Fedora project were looking for a way to improve the software development and troubleshooting the host OS stories on image-based Fedora variants like CoreOS and Silverblue. Various ideas were thrown around and none of us knew exactly what we needed, until someone stumbled upon github.com/coreos/toolbox.

It made me realize that something similar to coreos/toolbox is what we are looking for. So, one can say that Toolbx was inspired by that project.

However, there were some significant differences. The older project used rkt, which was already either unmaintained or weakly maintained, and systemd-nspawn(1), which needed root permission on the host. We couldn't rely on a container tooling foundation that was on its way out, and we couldn't expect users to have root permission on their host to have access to a command line environment that felt familiar to what they were used to on package-based OSes.

There was uncertainty over the github.com/coreos organization because this was a few months after Red Hat announced that it's acquiring CoreOS, the company. It was unclear who the stewards of the organization and project were, what were their plans going forward, etc..

Back then CoreOS, the company had a distribution called Container Linux and the rkt container tool. Since then, Container Linux has turned into Fedora CoreOS and rkt has been replaced by Podman.

Fortunately, the technical problems got solved because rootless Podman started being a thing merely a few weeks before, and for a few months Toolbx (back then Fedora Toolbox) lived as a POSIX shell script and a Dockerfile on my local hard disk. After a lot of requests for a public Git repository, I uploaded it to my private namespace on GitHub, and when people started pushing for a less personal hosting, it moved to the Containers organization on GitHub because Podman was already there.

So that's how we ended up here today. :/

So that's how we ended up here today. :/

A heroic story, sir, because in the end, you've outlived all those other projects you mentioned anyway.

If toolbx.org is still a desirable piece of "Internet real estate," I'll happily (fully) subsidize whatever's the max number of years you can get at once from your current registrar. Just have your people contact my people at the Signed-off-by email in containers/toolbox@9b38e21. ;)

If not, no FOMO! The existing domain name is also good!

So that's how we ended up here today. :/

A heroic story, sir, because in the end, you've outlived all those other projects you mentioned anyway.

Thanks for the kind words. :)

If toolbx.org is still a desirable piece of "Internet real estate," I'll happily (fully) subsidize whatever's the max number of years you can get at once from your current registrar. Just have your people contact my people at the Signed-off-by email in containers/toolbox@9b38e21. ;)

If not, no FOMO! The existing domain name is also good!

Thanks for the generous offer. I have been trying to figure out how exactly containertoolbx.org is owned, because I didn't buy it myself personally. It's better if the digital properties of community projects (eg, flatpak.org, pipewire.org, etc.) aren't personally owned by a single person, but sometimes ideals and practice differ. :)

I will keep you informed.

I have been trying to figure out how exactly containertoolbx.org is owned, because I didn't buy it myself personally. It's better if the digital properties of community projects (eg, flatpak.org, pipewire.org, etc.) aren't personally owned by a single person, but sometimes ideals and practice differ. :)

I 100% agree, and half of the reason I'm asking is so I can find out how other FOSS projects manage this — to avoid a bash-hackers.org-type situation, where the site goes offline and the person who controls the domain is unresponsive.