Renaming fpm could help to avoid some confusion

[rouson]

TL/DR: Given fpm's support for building C and C++ projects, a name change could help to avoid initial misconceptions. Something like "Fun Package Manager" or "Fantastic Package Manager" would preserve the acronym fpm, and either name would accurately describe my experience of fpm. 😄

Motivation

I've had several recent experiences with introducing fpm to a project wherein the developers were unfamiliar with fpm and understandably assumed fpm is limited to building Fortran. Given recent very positive experiences I've had with building C and C++ projects with fpm, it would be nice to at least prevent this one obvious and avoidable source of confusion. To wit, I contributed a three-line (not counting one blank line) manifest to the SuperLU linear algebra package, which GitHub reports is 95% C and only 0.3% Fortran. I also forked Armadillo, a C++ project, and added a one-line fpm manifest that suffices for building it as a dependency of another project.

[perazz]

That's an amazing result, thank you for posting that @rouson - I wonder what happens in case of more complicated header folder structures, but still, it's pretty remarkable!

[rouson]

Seeing one thumbs up from @perazz and no complaints, I'm continuing to think about possible solutions this issue. Another alternative that just came to mind is "Flexible Package Manager".

Or there's the possibility to keep the name the same but edit the documentation to indicate that "Fortran" in the name refers to the language in which fpm is written -- in which case the documentation could be updated accordingly. For example, the first two sentences in the README.md could become "Fortran Package Manager (fpm) is a package manager and build system written in modern Fortran. Its key goal is to improve the user experience of building Fortran programs and their Fortran, C, and C++ dependencies." Is that accurate or are the intended use cases broader? For example, does anyone have experience with using fpm to build software in which the main program is in C or C++?