Every time I want to start a new open-source project, I come across this small “problem”: making sure that the name for the project isn’t already taken. Today I decided to solve it by creating a simple script that queries different open-source repositories to check if a project with the desired name exists.
Usage is quite simple:
$ name_taken.py enlightenment
Debian: Name not taken :-)
SourceForge: Name taken :-(
Currently, the script is in an early stage and can search for projects in Debian’s list of packages and on SourceForge. The code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/guyru/name_taken, and licensed under GPL2 or higher. Suggestions on how to make this tool more useful (and, of course, patches) are really welcome.