Martin Pool's blog

Arch vs tla

Google asked me: what is the difference between arch and tla?

The short answer is that they are two names for the same thing. The project was originally conceived of as arch: I suppose the idea of an arch connotes elegance, and it has a r-c sound to suggest revision control.

However arch is already in use as a command on Unix: it prints the machine architecture (e.g. i686). It's kind of a waste of a word, but nevertheless it exists and is depended upon by some scripts. So the program can't be actually called arch. For a while it was called larch, and there were forks with different command names. Some people say that Arch is the design and tla is the implementation.

Now it has settled on tla, which is either Tom Lord's Arch, three letter acronym, or doesn't stand for anything at all.

The short story is that Arch and tla are interchangeable when talking to people, but for computers you need to spell it tla.

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