I'm a little confused about the issue description, because "mov" is not a MIME type.
Examples of MIME types: "text/plain", "text/html", "image/png" "application/pdf", "video/quicktime", ...
If I was prevented from using the username "wcoenentext/html", then I wouldn't really be bothered by that. (Although I might question the design decisions that would necessitate such a restriction.)
I’m the author of the issue on Gitlab (small world, isn’t it ?)
Yes the message is confusing and I agree that .mov isn’t a MIME type but I was merely reporting the error message shown ( plus, they added .mov in their list of file types and had aliased it to .mp4 format, please see: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/config/in... )
> they added .mov in their list of file types and had aliased it to .mp4 format
That’s weird. Why’d they do that. They should make a separate entry for mov and associate it with video/quicktime
Guess it might be something related to https://stackoverflow.com/a/44785870 but like they point out, mov is a container format that can contain one of many different codecs used. And isn’t mp4 just a container too? Referring to mov files as video/mp4 seems straight up incorrect to me
I don’t think that’s quite right is it? As I understand, mp4 is based on mov. But they still very much are distinct container formats, and an implementation of the mp4 standard would likely not be able to correctly read mov files as is, would it?
They're very close. The ISO base media file format was directly based off of QuickTime container format.
If you look at a .mov file and a .mp4 file in a ISO bmff viewer, you'll generally see the only difference is the ftyp box is different ("qt " for .mov, "isom" for .mp4). Indeed, if you ask ffmpeg to make a .mov file and .mp4 file of the same content, literally the only difference is the contents of the "ftyp" box, every other byte is identical.
> literally the only difference is the contents of the "ftyp" box, every other byte is identical.
Not quite. There are some boxes acceptable in one but not the other. Strings inside MOOV are length-prefixed in MOV but null-terminated in ISOBMFF. There are a variety of differences like that.
The set of codecs allowed, also differs between the two.
They're pretty much interchangable. Video frameworks like gstreamer just give you qtdemux to parse .mov, .mp4, and even .m4a or .m4v (which are just MP4s with different file extensions).
Musk wasn’t the first to try to use weird names, but he didn’t quite succeed with that one. Quoth wiki:
"""the name would have violated California regulations as it contained characters that are not in the modern English alphabet,[321][322] and was then changed to "X Æ A-Xii". This drew more confusion, as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet.[323] The child was eventually named "X AE A-XII", with "X" as a first name and "AE A-XII" as a middle name.[324]"""
> with "X" as a first name and "AE A-XII" as a middle name
It sounds as though they allowed the middle name to contain a space, which doesn't match my mental model but perhaps that's how they do it in California. It invites the question: do they allow a first name to contain a space, so that ("X", "AE A-XII", "Last Name") and ("X AE", "A-XII", "Last Name") are different names?
EDIT: The funny thing isn't allowing spaces in a middle name; it's have a separate field for middle name(s) at all. Modern passports have just two name fields: "surname" and "given names". Both may contain spaces. But according to images on the web, Californian birth certificates really do have three name fields.
Any name can contain a space. For example "Ana Maria" is a common first name which contains a space. On official documents, generally a name will be separated into a given name and surname. In this case "<A> <B C>" and "<A B> C" are considered separate names.
Source: I have a space in my name and some of my different identity documents have the name as "<A> <B C>" or "<A B> C", which causes all sorts of administrative problems.
Leonardo da Vinci is another famous example of a last name with two words in it. It's very common in romance languages. Plus, lots of people in the American south just flat out have two first names or two middle names.
Last names in many places evolved from that same need to disambiguate between people though. Attach some marker of connection to a place (common in Finland, e.g. Joensuu meaning "mouth of river"), profession (common in Germany and UK, e.g. Müller, Cooper, meaning mill worker and barrelmaker), lineage (common in Iceland, e.g. Grímsson meaning "son of Grímur"), or some other culturally relevant characteristic.
Nowadays the meanings of our last names have largely disappeared, so you have countless Coopers who have never touched a barrel in their lives, whose children will be called Cooper also, despite that. I think it's a little sad that so much of what people call us is semantically equivalent to a random UUID with tons of namespace collision. With that in mind, I'd say "da Vinci" is more a last name than most of us have.
Having a name with "of Region/city/former kingdom/..." is often their last name. Unless you want to claim that these people do not have a last name.
I can understand that in some cultures this might seem weird or antiquated but here in Germany these names are reality. Sometimes people with such names are descendents of royalty and sometimes someones last name "from family-name" is thier last name and happens to historically correspond to one of germany's state names or city names or just a little town.
One a side note: In Germany in 1919-1920 royalty was no longer a legal aspect that changed how laws applied to you[1]. When that happened titles that were reserved for ruling functions (king, grand duke) were removed and all other titles were moved to be part of the persons name (such as prince etc.) and could not be decreed on anyone new. These titles still exist in Germany but are simply naming "conventions" in a formerly royal family.
Correct: his full name as given was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci," meaning more or less Piero's son Lionardo from Vinci. Deriving a childs name from their lineage was incredibly common.
Documents aside, do you consider <B> to be a given name (parent came up with it) or a surname (parent already had it)? If given, do you consider it optional (i.e., middle rather than first)? Sorry in advance for any shortsighted assumptions about the possibilities here!
A UK passport has a "surname" field and a "given names" field. But a recent UK birth certificate has a single name field in which the "surname" part is distinguished by being written in capitals, so "Peter James ADAM SMITH" would have a surname consisting of two words. But what if a word consists of a single letter? For example, some Irish surnames look like "O Briain", and I think there is a Vietnamese name that consists of a single vowel, so presumably you can't always tell from the birth certificate which part is the surname.
In Italy there is First Name, Other Names, and Family Name on the birth certificate. All fields can contain spaces (as well as hyphens, apostrophes, and some other diacritics).
The legal name however consists of First and Family names only, without the other names. Therefore many people have two names in the First Name field, usually separated by a space. The disadvantage is that in all official forms they have to spell out all the first name(s), no omissions or abbreviations are generally admitted.
One nice side-effect of this is that you can have a bit of fun with the Other Names since they're "unofficial". If the child wants to use those names later, they can, if they don't, they can pretend they don't exist. Some friends of ours put "Danger" in their kid's "other names", for example.
The Swedish situation is... confusing. :-) There are first names ("förnamn"), possibly more than one. The one in daily use — not necessarily the first one! — is called "tilltalsnamn" (something like "addressing name"), and is traditionally marked in official paperwork by underlining or with an asterisk. (You know someone has not done their homework when you get junk mail that starts with "Dear <Wrongname>!) Then there used to be middle names ("mellannamn"), which was something put between the first and last names. These were typically used e.g. by people who wanted to have both their own and their spouse's name. These are no longer issued, though those who have them can keep them. Instead, you can now have a double last name, which used to be impossible. (People have sported "double-barrelled surnames" for ages, but they have not, as far as I can understand, been officially recognised, but functioned more like "stage names").
The confusing bit is that the rules about middle names and double surnames have changed at least twice in... my lifetime, which is becoming much longer than I care to think about. :-) I didn't do a very good job of conveying that in my comment.
Small nitpick, if you are* in Germany but have an e.g. Spanish name (e.h. Hector Garcia Gonzalez) then... that's 2 surnames without a dash. I have no idea what happens if you marry or have children, but your example is just the -most basic- version.
*"you are" meaning you'd be a German citizen with a German passport.
> I have no idea what happens if you marry or have children
When you marry, you get to define what is going to be the family name and then children born from that marriage get to be registered with that family name.
In the case of foreign-born people, they can keep the naming rules from their original country. In the case of the marriage between foreigners from two different countries, you have to choose which rules are you going to follow, but the family name stays fixed.
To us (Brazilian marrying a Greek) it was a very interesting process. I have two last family names, and Greek names are gender-conjugated (i.e, the last name changes whether you are a boy or a girl). It the end the simplest thing to do was to just keep only one my last family names.
Is it that rare? I have two middle names (William Howard) and I never thought much of it. As a kid, I was more amused by a friend of my sister's who had a quadruple-barrelled surname...
I have two middle names; most financial service providers decline to recognise my second middle-name. Same goes for the taxman and my pension provider. It seems that a "full name" is no longer a canonical identifier for a person, just really a kind of nickname; the canonical identifier is now an account-number, employee-ID or whatever.
And thanks to people moving house, or even changing profession, or acquiring some defining trait or accomplishment. With most people being undocumented throughout history, names could be much more fluid, like the way a person's "nickname" may change many times with or without consent.
No. There is not limit. That can by proven by seeing people with multiple middle names or by naming your child with multiple middle names. How could there possibly be a limit? Even with the case where systems can not store or recognize the length of such a name, the middle names themselves are not limited. People's names are not entries in a compiler's symbol table.
The EU — which doesn’t include all European nations — has 24 official languages and 3 official character sets. The Danish name for the EU contains an æ (“Den Europæiske Union”). Prior heads of state of current members include Μακάριος Γ΄, with the gamma translating as “III” (i.e. “the third”). The UK has a very relaxed attitude to name changing, hence the story of Mr. Yellow-Rat Foxysquirrel Fairydiddle.
Unless Musk tries to name future kids in Emoji, European nations can probably already cope with any of this sort of thing.
There's actually an increasingly common naming pattern that I think is very weird, but in the end, I just let them do whatever. In the grand scheme of things, having a unique name can really help you stand out, and they can always go by a nickname. It doesn't hurt anything, and it could very well help.
I'm glad California regulators are focusing on the critical issue of what characters may appear in children's names. Does it ever occur to people in government that some things may not be their problem?
That's definitely a reasonable thing for governments to care about, since governments generally need to keep track of people's names in some way or other.
It's probably a good idea if government computers can keep track of the name, so a minimum requirement would probably be "can be represented by unicode glyphs". So attempts like Prince's should probably be disqualified. And even in the unicode set there are characters that may be problematic - Record Separators, Zero Width Space, Pile of Poo emoji springs to mind as examples, even if the later one might be doable. It's hard to address a letter to a person whose name just consists of a mix of different whitespace characters (especially when their neighbor is a different mix whitespace characters). So, yes, government probably should care about this, at least a little bit.
That said, Æ should probably be allowed. It's a standard character in several living languages.
The reason I think that maybe Æ should qualify is that it's not entirely unlikely to occur in immigrants' names anyway (or at least the lower case version). There are systems for transforming such characters to something that appears in passports - my own name has an umlaut, and I've obviously got a passport. I'm not American, so my passport is of course not issued in USA, but I suspect few countries would see a name diversity as great as USA so it can't be a new problem for the authorities there.
Does it occur to you that changing a database schema across an entire state government might incur significant costs and take multiple years to implement? Every courthouse, DMV, hospital, etc. might be running different, decades-old proprietary software, and who knows if the disparate, original contractors are still around.
Why is it my problem to make my children conform to government tracking and enumeration, rather than their problem that my children are hard for them to easily assimilate? Government exists for my children, not my children for government. Their technical problems are their problems, not mine.
And practically, in a world where people cross borders, where people come to this country for refuge and opportunity, how does it make sense to force them all to have only basic English characters in their names?
I'm not asking what is, but why it should be that way. Why should I name my children for the government's convenience? Why are Jürgen, Hafþór, Renée, or Noël unacceptable names?
The government(s) will be happy to receive & evaluate your generous donation of upgrades to the myriad existing record keeping systems, and further generous donations of your time to train all staff on how to enter and search for the additional written characters, so long as the process does not significantly disrupt operations. "Patches welcome!" (^o^)/
But in seriousness: it is their concern because changes that seem minor can require major changes to electronic systems, and allowing special cases that necessitate lookup in ways the electronic systems can't handle (perhaps even requring manual search through hardcopy!) really throw a star-mangled spanner in the works.
Naming is already a special case problem in Japan, where people are accustomed to having no idea how to pronounce most people's names because the parents used non-standard readings of the kanji characters and/or used kanji from a special exempted list of archaic kanji that almost nobody can read. If you're wondering why the government doesn't require people use only the official "common use" kanji, at least just for this one problem, then I should tell it has been tried — enough people raised a fuss about being unable to register their child's "perfect name" that gradually a list of "allowed only in names" kanji was created and expanded.
And if I recall correctly, when registering a name, you can specify a totally unrelated pronunciation using the simpler non-kanji phonetic characters, so even just "common use" kanji are almost "all bets off". A relative few kanji have such common pronunciation in names that they can 'usually' be guessed.
And the problem is the same with many Japanese place-names, having little or no correlation between written form and pronunciation or meaning.
So, why is the spelling of a chosen name any concern to a government? It gets crazy out there, in Name Land. How mäný variatǐons of spelliñg cån ße ællowèd before people give up on pronouncing it?
Why is everyone trying to convince me that handling names is hard for computer systems? That's obvious to everyone, even me.
What's fascinating to me is that none of you consider that government might not need to have a list of everyone it governs, or that such a list might not need to be centralized or computerized. When faced with a facet of humanity that's too complex to be easily reduced to consistent data, private groups either do their best and work with what data they can extract, or else have people handle it, with our flexible, tolerant minds. When government is involved, though, the immediate response is, "We have to force people to be less complex!"
I'm beginning to see technocracy as the biggest threat to a diverse, human, and humane society.
This is actually probably good. My wife has a hyphen in her first name and the amount of government systems including Social Security itself will most of the time result in some validation error when the hyphen is included and it even adds confusion for employees when in an office and their ancient software doesn't even result in an error, it'll just straight up not work and not give them any context on what could be wrong.
My wife and I changed our last names in California when we got married.
There are quite specific rules:
The new name must be in the format {substring of original name 1}{?-}{substring of original name 2}, or you have to go through the much more arduous and expensive full name change process (though you get a 2 for 1 discount).
> as Æ is not a letter in the modern English alphabet.
That specious, meaning appearing true but actually false. It is a diphthong expressed by a ligature of two letters. The claim was never made that a diphthong is a single letter, and it is easily expressed in modern English, in a computer using ascii and outside on a piece of paper.
In latin, æ or ae was a (di)graph for the /ae/ diphthong. In English, it is typically pronounced using the /i/ phoneme, which isn't a diphthong. I have heard it pronounced as /ai/ dipthong, but only rarely.
In English, I'm pretty sure the ae digraph is always pronounced as /i/, so calling it a dipthong would probably confuse most people.
Agreed. That is a very good point about it possibly being just a digraph and not always a diphthong. This depends, however, on the use, since it does sometimes slide and other times is just a ligature. The issues seem to stem from the pronunciation changes and the great vowel shift. As you point out, language is a messy business.
You're correct about that, sort of but not in the sense of language - only for computer definitions. A ligature in language is "a printed or written character (such as æ or ff) consisting of two or more letters or characters joined together" [1]
Need to be careful with that. There was a guy in California a few years back that decided the license plate "NULL" would be a fun joke, and he ended up being charged every ticket issued in the state where the license plate wasn't entered.
I recall pondering the mechanics of this back when I first read about it. Is some software actually replacing an input of "" (empty string) with "NULL"? Or is some comparison so loosely typed that a value of type null is considered equal enough to the string "NULL"?
'' when assigned to a char(1) becomes ' ' (char types are blank padded strings).
'' when assigned to a varchar2(1) becomes '' which is a zero length string and a zero length string is NULL in Oracle (it is no long '')
The conflation of empty string with a real null isn't great, but it doesn't also imply conflation of the string "NULL" which is what I'm trying to figure out. The four-character sequence shouldn't ever be considered something other than a four-character string, except for particular non-user-facing situations such as when actually writing code. Even spreadsheet software, which does all kinds of heuristics to find numbers in strings for example, doesn't treat the string "NULL" as anything other than a four-character string, to my knowledge.
There is no such thing as a file extension name, it's a file name extension. It's called this way because file names could only be 8-byte strings initially and then this was extended with 3 extra byte places.
Neither part of the MIME type format even has to match any existing (commonly used) file name extension anyway. E.g. it can be `text/plain`. Even when it does it is just a coincidence (although very common), it actually references the format name (IIRC `image/jpeg` was used even when almost nobody were using `jpeg` for the extension and the convention was to use `jpg`).
> * file names could only be 8-byte strings initially and then this was extended*
At least part of that is not true. The ‘popular’ MS-DOS 8.3 form derives via CP/M from DEC OSes which used 6 character file names and 3 character file types, due to their use of RAD50¹ to fit 3 characters in a 16- or 18-bit word. The type field always existed, so the word ‘extension’ most likely refers to its presentation on the end of the file name, rather than an addition to a previous format.
This is interesting because compounds are mostly written together in other languages.
Never thought about it but file extension name really is a word. Someone replied saying this is three words, but it is not is it? It's an open compound word or maybe a "set phrase", I wanted to call it an idiomatic expression but that was clearly wrong.
The Wikipedia articles for "Set phrase" [0] and "Compound (linguistics)" [1] actually don't offer much of a distinction, so it's hard to say which of those is correct. Regardless, a compound with spaces ("open," as you said) is multiple words, not one word.
> I'm a little confused about the issue description
Not helped by the fact that even with explicit cajoling* to give steps to reproduce, the reporter wrote:
> Steps to reproduce
>Try to login/create an user in Gitlab (on-premises/Gitlab.com) where the username ends with a MIME type format
Goddamit, those are not steps to reproduce! Has the current era of "social coding" and its terrible software development practices completely turned people's brains to mush?
(In fact, such cajoling shouldn't even be required. If you don't know you need to provide STR without someone going to the lengths of coddling you by going out of their way to create a template, you don't have any business using a bug tracker.)
The provided step-to-reproduce (not steps, since there's only one) seems to be regarded by the reporter as an automic operation (indivisble; a single step).
The other person is, I think, trying to express that it can potentially be done more than one way, so additional steps are required.
From a QA perspective, I prefer not to guess what the reporter might have intended. It's much better to have tons of detail, but I can sympathise with being the user and _thinking_ you have been totally clear and am know I've sometimes done this myself.
(( Unrelatedly, "ok boomer"? Since that seems such a non sequitur, I'll take in another unrelated direction and raise you an "ok athena" and "waddaya hear, starkuck?". ))
You have been trolled. The entire point of saying "ok boomer" here is to, as economically as possible, be dismissive while getting the other side to spend disproportionate energy defending the the thing being dismissed.
> From a QA perspective, I prefer not to guess what the reporter might have intended
There's not really any other perspective. That thing which you say you "prefer" is much more than a preference. It is the only reason why the bug tracker is configured to even ask for STR. If you have a "no solicitors" sign on your front door and a solicitor comes knocking anyway, or you have your door locked and a burglar climbs through a broken window and and takes all your stuff, you wouldn't respond by saying, "from my perspective, it's really disruptive and time-consuming to deal with solicitors who ignore the sign" or, "try to understand that from my perspective, it's really inconvenient when you take my things, because I have to work and spend money to replace them when I could have used that time and money doing something else." To do so tacitly legitimizes an illegitimate position held by the other.
Please look up "DARVO" to understand why explaining yourself like this is a bad idea.
This is a very confusing issue description which is caused by a confusing error message. This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28540665 does a great job explaining the context. TLDR; you can't have a username end in .filetype because it might cause the user profile page to not load. The limitation is _not_ related to injection attack prevention, that would be concerning (bobby tables xkcd https://xkcd.com/327/ ).
And it was exacerbated by another bug which was causing the absence of a period to be ignored, so any username ending in a recognized filetype was blocked (e.g. "AsiMOV" in the example, or "MaasTIFF" in the comments).
I initially suspected that a regex was involved and someone forgot to escape the period, but it looks like that wasn't even the case -- the erroneous code was literally checking if the username ended in any recognized extension.
"ERROR: The Gitlab server has rejected the proposed username, as it ends in the same suffix as a file extension that is registered to a MIME type in the Ruby runtime under which the server runs. This list is quite long, and possibly difficult to retrieve, so we will not list it here, but you can find a list of extensions commonly used if you Google for MIME. Alternatively, if this makes no sense at all, ask a local alpha geek and they should be able to help. We understand this is weird, but the reasons for doing so are currently embargoed as they potentially have wide ranging security or stability consequences for a large number of installs. If you wouldn't mind, please do us a small one and keep quiet while we have a chance to prepare and distribute a patch without forcing anyone to forego any nights of sleep 18 months into a global pandemic complete with associated societal fracturing and potential economic collapse. Thank you for your cooperation on this easy, basic and very important matter."
It’s unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to know and use terminology perfectly. The description itself was well-written and that’s what’s important in terms of finding/fixing the issue.
It's foolish to use a standard well defined very precise but incorrect term of art like like "MIME Type" that is actively misleading to a technical audience of github users who are more likely than most people to know the standard official definition, and which is LESS commonly known than a correct widely understood vernacular term like "file name extension", if your goal is to be understood by everyone.
I'd rather a technically oriented site like github be "unrealistic" and correct and instructive, than foolish and wrong and misleading. Are you really saying it's better to use the wrong term because github users might not understand the more widely known correct term?
Just how does leading the user on a wild goose chase looking up the definition of "MIME Type," causing them to waste their time and misunderstand the error message, when it's really a file name extension (a term which more people understand anyway), help the user achieve their goals?
The bottom line is that github disallowing "MIME Types" or "file name extensions" in user names, just like a bank disallowing "select" and "drop" and "from" and "null" and "delete" and "bobby" and "tables" in passwords, is a symptom of a much larger more terrible problem, and whoever wrote that stupid error message instead of fixing the underlying bug that caused it has much worse problems than poor English language writing skills.
The bug reporter merely copies the incorrect error that gitlab gave him; The issue here is that someone working in login / security of gitlab doesn't know what a mime type is. That is extremely worrying - it's not a part of the code where you can afford to be sloppy.
It's a very odd error. Apparently .nro is a file extension used by the Nintendo Switch video game console; .o is obviously the output of compilers, so I'm not sure why my username wasn't rejected. Maybe it would be if I tried to register now.
No file extension <-> MIME type "registry" exists. File extensions exist completely outside of MIME. Many file extensions do not correspond to a registered MIME type, or in many cases even a de-facto one (other than application/octet-stream or text/plain).
It seems pretty obvious - based on the failed username in question, and to someone with fairly deep technical knowledge - that they mean anything they consider a file extension. Which is not an excuse for this marvel of awful UI slapped on top of a poorly-thought-out workaround (for some unknown vuln (that's been patched for over 2 months and is still private? quite strange for an "open" company eh?).
FWIW, the IANA media type registry [1] lists "File extension(s)" under "Additional information" for some of the media types, so it may make sense to speak of filename extensions associated with registered media types. Though given the initial odd wording, it could be anything.
Edit: as for what's actually used, looks like [2] it's the ruby mime-types gem [3], which is based on both IANA registry and various other recommendations [4], AIUI.
That "[1]" was for the registry, the extensions are listed for particular media types, such as application/xml [1]. Also mentioned in RFC 6838 section 4.12 [2].
And indeed, what IANA registers there is media types, so I've only mentioned associations. I think it still works for a-dub's argument, that it's obvious (though I'd word it differently, such as it being a reasonable guess) that if "MIME type format" is mentioned and "mov" is shown as an example, what's actually meant is filename extensions associated with registered and/or otherwise known media types (which turned out to be the case).
But "mov" is not shown as an example. The particular requestor in this issue wanted to use mov, however no example was shown in the error message. Moreover even in the requestor's case the user has to already be savvy enough to guess that "mov" is the part of "isaac.asimov" that it had a problem with, which is not at all obvious.
I don't know exactly what list GitLab is using (because, as has been mentioned, there's no central registry of file extensions), but there are many extensions more obscure and less obvious than even mov, which would further obfuscate the actual problem.
> File extensions exist completely outside of MIME.
Yes. I am well aware that certain software, such as Windows, MimeMagic, or Apache, do include their own lists. That is not a "registry" and in fact you will likely find that every such list is either identical to, a fork of, or incompatible with every other such list.
Whether you call such a list a registry or not is fairly trivial, I think. Their web server uses such a mapping, and for some reason usernames with suffixes on that list confused something. Call it a registry, or a mapping, or a list, the meaning of the statement is the same, and I don't think it prevents most people from understanding what's going on.
registry (noun): a place or office where registers or records are kept; an official list or register.
In this case, a registry would be a mapping, however a mapping is not a registry. A registry is the single, centralized place from which you can look up registrations, to guarantee that there are no conflicting records. Literally none of that is (or can be, at this point) true of file extensions.
Gitlab recently exchanged the "WIP" prefix for merge requests (Work in Progress = started to do something but didn't complete it yet) for "Draft", which has connotations of throwing the draft/sketch away to build the final product.
Which is definitively not what is meant there. But I think it shows that Gitlab is not a company I'd go to if I wanted linguistic precision.
I am not a native English speaker (and I don't work at Gitlab) but I am curious and interested in using proper terms, as I think as developer that naming is a very important skill.
So, I find strange this meaning that you give for a "draft" = that it is something that has connotation of throwing away when building the final product.
I think you are confusing a "draft" with a "sketch" and they are not the same.
I googled the term "draft" and here is what I found:
> "a version of something (such as a document) that you make before you make the final version" [1]
> "A preliminary version of a piece of writing." [2]
While "sketch" means:
> "a rough drawing representing the chief features of an object or scene and often made as a preliminary study" [3]
> "A rough or unfinished version of any creative work." [3]
> "A rough or unfinished drawing or painting, often made to assist in making a more finished picture." [4]
In the case of sketch I see some keywords like "preliminary study" or "assist" or "unfinished version" that indicates that the sketch will not be the final product.
So while it is true that a Draft could be thrown away if someone has new/better/difference ideas while working on it, it does not seem to imply that a Draft should be thrown when building the final product.
As far as I understand it is more that a draft will evolve into a final product or might be abandoned.
Unfortunately, here, I think the problem is that English is not very clear.
As a native English speaker, the first time I encountered the word 'draft' was at primary school. We used it to describe a piece of writing where presentation was not the focus, instead, content and accuracy in terms of spelling, grammar, and punctuation would be the focus. Once the drafts were complete, we would 'copy these up' in our neatest handwriting.
However, if I prepare a 'draft' of some document or other for my boss, I expect it to be essentially an unapproved version of a final document, perhaps needing some minor modifications before release, but also perhaps not.
Although personally, I would use 'sketch' to mean something disposable which illustrates a more perfect version, my grandmother is an artist, and she refers to the initial drawings she makes on the canvas as 'sketches', which she then paints over in more detail.
Essentially, I don't think there's a big difference between draft and sketch - both could (in my opinion) represent either a version which will be discarded or which will be developed further.
Overall, I think here, the 'Work In Progress' label is the clearest and least likely to be interpreted differently by different users.
It's also interesting the in English we also have Drafters or draughtsman/draughtswoman, who's job is drafting, which is the process of creating technical drawings for manufacture.[1]
In a highly technical environment this is the kind of work I associate with drafting, but not necessarily with the word draft.
The wikipedia page for "Draft" has a veritable smorgasbord of different things that are considered "Drafts"[2], which kind of illustrates that getting pedantic about the definition of the word is losing proposition.
But a native english speakers as well, I agree with you, that the everyday colloquial definition of the word "draft" is an incomplete piece of work that needs further refinement before it can be considered complete or final.
> I am not a native English speaker (and I don't work at Gitlab) but I am curious and interested in using proper terms, as I think as developer that naming is a very important skill.
That is it for me too and why I think this change is so annoying.
WIP means something is being worked on. [0]
Draft can mean the same, but it also has a bunch of other possible meanings. Note that if you search in both of your sources, you'll find "sketch" as an explaination. It can mean the same, but it can also mean a bunch of other things. It's a strictly worse name.
Most likely the rename is in order to get more people to understand what it is without having to look up abbreviations. "Draft" is clear to most people who know English, while "WIP" puts a lot more burden on the reader in terms of what they already need to know in order to understand.
A draft in the visual arts (drawing, painting), is typically abandoned, like a sketch. Perhaps it uses a different medium to the final version, and in any case can't easily be adapted.
A draft in writing is typically incrementally improved, or at least we think of it that way now that we write on computers. We don't need to start again even for substantial changes like adding a new paragraph.
In internet, in most places I've seen "draft" as being something that is not yet published. For example in a lot of blogging software like WordPress, you can save your post and it will be "Draft", but only will be visible to others when you publish, so it's not thrown away in most contexts that I know it being used in the Internet.
Isn't it the same connotation here? The work is shared with your collaborators, but not yet "published" to the master branch or to customers or wherever?
> which has connotations of throwing the draft/sketch away to build the final product
I think it's only software developers who urge others to first write a draft, then throw it away and start working on the real thing. Usually, a draft precedes the "real" version and it's a status attached to something. Eventually, a "draft" becomes "published" or something similar.
Authors, scientists, email writes, report creators, movie/music producers all create drafts that (maybe) eventually become the real thing, I don't think many of them throw away the draft but rather work on the draft until it's not a draft anymore.
> it seems pretty obvious that they mean any file extension registered to a known MIME type.
I guess I'm dense, but I actually thought it's about users such as Mr. Joe R Text/Plain. When I read about "mov" in the actual issue, then it became clear.
Since file extensions can be any three or fewer (or even more) valid characters, then no string ending with zero to three characters, in other words, no user names are valid.
Examples of MIME types: "text/plain", "text/html", "image/png" "application/pdf", "video/quicktime", ...
If I was prevented from using the username "wcoenentext/html", then I wouldn't really be bothered by that. (Although I might question the design decisions that would necessitate such a restriction.)