ADR-009: Project Name — Evaluation of Alternatives (owner-delegated)

Date: 2026-10-19 Status: Accepted — owner-delegated decision Decision owner: repository owner, delegated via the autonomous-mode brief Supersedes: none

Context

The project is currently named FlowForge. A previous audit established that the name is heavily conflicted:

• npm flowforge is reserved by another account (published then unpublished in 2021), so publishing is blocked.
• PyPI flow-forge is taken (MIT, "Development Status :: 1 - Planning").
• 12+ GitHub repositories use the name, three of them above 100 stars.
• A venture-funded company named FlowForge (founded 2021-04-02, US, $2.7M seed) built a Node-RED DevOps platform and later rebranded to FlowFuse.
• flowforgesoft.com is an active commercial product.

The owner delegated the naming decision with an explicit rule: evaluate up to five distinctive candidates (explicitly excluding generic "X-Forge" and "Flow-X" patterns); adopt one only if it is clearly clean on PyPI + GitHub + web; otherwise keep FlowForge.

Options evaluated

Five distinctive, non-generic candidates were chosen for their thematic fit (controlled flow, fleets of workers, load-bearing connections):

Candidate	Rationale for shortlisting
Penstock	A penstock is the conduit that regulates water flow into a turbine — precise metaphor for controlled task dispatch
Bowline	A knot that holds under load yet unties cleanly — resilience and graceful shutdown
Flotilla	A group of small vessels operating together — a fleet of workers
Weir	A low dam that regulates flow over a channel — scheduling and back-pressure
Halyard	The rope used to raise and lower a sail — coordination of distributed parts

Measurements (2026-10-19)

Registry results, queried directly from the PyPI JSON API, the npm registry and the crates.io API:

Candidate	PyPI	npm	crates.io
penstock	TAKEN 0.1.0 (Josh Puglielli)	TAKEN (9 versions)	TAKEN 0.1.1, 41 downloads
bowline	TAKEN 0.2.2 (Marco Gancitano)	TAKEN (4 versions)	free
flotilla	TAKEN 0.3.2 (olgabot)	TAKEN (13 versions)	TAKEN 0.1.0, 729 downloads
weir	TAKEN 0.4.0 (Stephen Drake)	TAKEN (11 versions)	TAKEN 0.0.0, 25 downloads
halyard	TAKEN 0.2.12	TAKEN (0 versions)	TAKEN 0.1.0, 41 downloads

GitHub repository-name matches (gh api search/repositories?q=<name>+in:name, sorted by stars):

Candidate	Repos matching name	Top result
penstock	33	athoune/go-penstock (3★)
bowline	55	maccman/bowline (632★)
flotilla	404	tylertread/Flotilla (238★), stitchfix/flotilla-os (195★)
weir	7 978	GrrrDog/weird_proxies (1 891★) — substring matches dominate
halyard	220	spinnaker/halyard (316★), a real Spinnaker configuration tool

Decision

Keep the name FlowForge.

Every candidate is already registered on PyPI. The owner's rule requires a candidate to be clearly clean on PyPI and GitHub and the web; none qualifies, so the fallback branch of the rule applies.

Consequences

• The Python distribution name remains flowforge; the import package remains flowforge.
• Publishing to npm under the name flowforge remains impossible without acquiring the name from its current holder.
• Publishing to PyPI as flowforge remains possible (the slot is free), but flow-forge is already occupied by an unrelated project.
• The GitHub repository stays Abolfazlrwm/flowforge.
• The naming risk is documented in docs/development/NAMING_ANALYSIS.md and is listed as a known limitation in docs/development/PROGRESS.md.

Alternatives considered

• Adopt a candidate anyway. Rejected: each is taken on PyPI, which is the distribution channel that matters most for a Python library, and several also collide with well-known GitHub projects (Spinnaker Halyard, Flotilla OS).
• Coined name (e.g. a nonsense word). Not evaluated: the owner restricted the search to five candidates and required a distinctive-but-meaningful name. A coined name remains the strongest option if the project ever needs a trademark.
• Rename to TaskForge. Rejected earlier: the previous audit renamed without owner approval, and that rename was reverted in 1352e22.