RFC: Rename "pointcloud" to "point cloud"

[l0b0]

The standard spelling for this seems to be two words, "point cloud", so it might make sense to rename pointcloud.py to point_cloud.py, PointcloudExtension to PointCloudExtension, etc. What do you think?

[gadomski]

@l0b0 can you provide some examples of the two-word version being standard? IMO this is a soft standard at best. For one example, PDAL prefers the two-word version in prose (e.g. on https://pdal.io/about.html), but uses the one-word version in code more often:

➜  PDAL git:(master) grep 'point_cloud\|PointCloud' -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.hpp . | wc -l
      54
➜  PDAL git:(master) grep 'pointcloud\|Pointcloud' -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.hpp . | wc -l
     146

[duckontheweb]

It seems like we should align with whatever the official extension title is in the extension repo. Since that extension uses "Point Cloud" as the title it seems like we should use the 2-word version as well.

However, if we're going to update this extension it seems like we should also update the other extensions that don't follow this naming convention. For example, Scientific Extension is actually the Scientific Citation Extension, File Extension is actually File Info Extension, etc.

Is it worth updating all of these to align with the actual extension names for consistency?

[l0b0]

@gadomski I guess my main argument would be their relative popularity: In the US the split is 90%/10%, in the UK 84%/16%, and in India 93%/7%. English is a normative rather than prescriptive language, but it seems like the norm is two words rather than one.

[jsignell]

Hmm I was just looking over the 2.0 milestone and came across this. The file names in pystac seem to come from the extension repo names:

• https://github.com/stac-extensions/pointcloud
• https://github.com/stac-extensions/file
  ...

I do think the file names in pystac should continue to match those.

The extension classes could certainly be changed to match the title, but I am pretty ambivalent about whether that would make pystac easier to use.