dowel

ADR-0014: Adopt dowel as the official name

Status: Accepted

Supersedes: ADR-0006

Context

ADR-0006 selected dowel as a provisional name. Primary trademark searches (USPTO TESS, J-PlatPat, EUIPO eSearch) and namespace acquisition were left open, and until they were done the name was treated as tentative: documents carried a “provisional name” caveat, and changes that would embed the name broadly into identifiers and paths were avoided.

Decision

dowel is the official name of the project. The provisional standing from ADR-0006 is lifted: identifiers, paths, and documentation may embed the name freely. dowelup follows the name (ADR-0013).

Consequences

  • Documents drop the “provisional name” caveat. Q5 (finalizing the name) in docs/99-open-questions.md is closed by this decision
  • The namespace and trademark follow-ups noted in ADR-0006 remain worth doing, but they no longer gate the name. In particular, the PyPI name dowel is held by an unrelated project, so anything published to PyPI will need a distinct name
  • Constraints that existed only because the name was provisional — such as not publishing the VS Code extension to the marketplace — are lifted. Whether to publish is now a separate decision on its own merits