I’ve searched a little about this and I don’t seem to find an answer to this trivial question: What does ‘ZYpp’ in libzypp and Zypper stand for? Any particular story about why that name was chosen?
libzypp’s description reads ‘Package, Patch, Pattern, and Product Management’ which could mean the last two letters, but there are four 'P’s in that sentence, not two, and no ‘Z’ or ‘Y’ anywhere.
“Z” and “Y” stand for Zenworks and Yast - libzypp should be the common part of the two projects.
On Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:06:02 +0000, GreatEmerald wrote:
> I’ve searched a little about this and I don’t seem to find an answer to
> this trivial question: What does ‘ZYpp’ in libzypp and Zypper stand for?
> Any particular story about why that name was chosen?
>
> libzypp’s description reads ‘Package, Patch, Pattern, and Product
> Management’ which could mean the last two letters, but there are four
> 'P’s in that sentence, not two, and no ‘Z’ or ‘Y’ anywhere.
At a guess, it’s because zypper grew out of Ximian’s Red Carpet updater,
which became Novell’s ZENworks for Linux, which combined Red Carpet with
YaST for software updates.
Z = ZEN
Y = YaST
If I were to speculate, “patch/package” probably is where the ‘pp’ comes
from, since those are the two actual deliverables that zypper installs
(the others are classifications for patches and packages, rather than
something that would be downloaded).
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
Interesting. So if you were to use full words, it would be “Zero Effort Networking and Yet another Setup Tool Package, Patch, Pattern, and Product Management” 
On Sun, 26 Jun 2011 08:06:02 +0000, GreatEmerald wrote:
> Interesting. So if you were to use full words, it would be “Zero Effort
> Networking and Yet another Setup Tool Package, Patch, Pattern, and
> Product Management”
Perhaps, yes.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
And i always thought it is the hip form of zipper, like the zipper on you jacket or pants. 
One could also bet the name comes from the word Zippy, as the new loading times of the package manager are quite zippy compared to how it was before (I used openSUSE when it was version 9.2, man was installing things slower then molasses on that thing)