Is it really necessary to have 'lolcow' in the docs?

[ab]

Bit of an unpleasant find when I was perusing the docs today. Given it's essentially 4chan's word for people we can harass until they do something really bad either to themselves or others. I'm sure it's a hangover from early days before sylab took this on, but I at least would appreciate it not being there.

Best,

a

[David Trudgian]

Hi,

The use of 'lolcow' in the Singularity documentation doesn't have a relationship to the 4chan meaning. I believe that our use of 'lolcow' actually predates the negative connotations, and it is absolutely not intended with the negative meaning. It comes from a combination of 'lolcat' and 'cowsay', two command line utilities that are chained together in a demo container that show a rainbow colored (lolcat) message in a speech bubble above a cow (cowsay).

https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat/

https://github.com/tnalpgge/rank-amateur-cowsay

There's a lot of reference to 'lolcow' in the documentation because that's the name of the demo container image. I agree that it is unfortunate that there is the matching 4chan related term. We can likely look into renaming our own examples to avoid confusion over this, but historic Singularity documentation with the term is likely to be long lived.

Thanks,

Dave Trudgian

[ab]

Thanks for explaining this - that's very good to know! I personally think it would be better to rename things going forward, but it's much more palatable with this information

Best,

a