I first suggested the renaming of InnoDB to monty at M|17, but he was concerned about compatibility and the discussion did not go further.

I think that we must accept an alias for compatibility: ENGINE=InnoDB, SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS, SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'innodb%'. Maybe the first step of this exercise should be to do something similar to what Percona Server did:

git grep -i '".*xtradb' Percona-Server-5.7.30-33 storage/innobase/|grep -v 'DBUG\|#include'|cut -d: -f2-

storage/innobase/handler/ha_innodb.cc:  "Percona-XtraDB, Supports transactions, row-level locking, and foreign keys",

storage/innobase/handler/xtradb_i_s.cc:	STRUCT_FLD(name, "XTRADB_READ_VIEW"),

storage/innobase/handler/xtradb_i_s.cc:	STRUCT_FLD(name, "XTRADB_INTERNAL_HASH_TABLES"),

storage/innobase/handler/xtradb_i_s.cc:	STRUCT_FLD(name, "XTRADB_RSEG"),

storage/innobase/handler/xtradb_i_s.cc:	STRUCT_FLD(name, "XTRADB_ZIP_DICT"),

storage/innobase/handler/xtradb_i_s.cc:	STRUCT_FLD(name, "XTRADB_ZIP_DICT_COLS"),

storage/innobase/srv/srv0mon.cc:	 "Always 0 in XtraDB.",

storage/innobase/srv/srv0mon.cc:	 "Always 0 in XtraDB.",

storage/innobase/srv/srv0mon.cc:	 "Always 0 in XtraDB.",

storage/innobase/srv/srv0mon.cc:	 "Always 0 in XtraDB.",

storage/innobase/srv/srv0start.cc:			<< "Percona XtraDB (http://www.percona.com) " INNODB_VERSION_STR

They are limiting the XtraDB branding to a startup message in the error log, to the plugin description, and some extensions over the corresponding MySQL release (5.7).

For the record, the file xtradb_i_s.cc defines a few new INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables: XTRADB_READ_VIEW and so on. The changes in srv0mon.cc document that some performance metrics are disabled. (In MDEV-15706, I would like to replace that interface altogether.)

ralf.gebhardt@mariadb.com, can we change the startup message and the plugin description? Perhaps that could already be done in GA releases?

Perhaps in the next major release, we could introduce more prominent interface changes (two names for the storage engine and all its associated interfaces)? How to pull that off technically could affect both the storage engine and code outside it. We would probably want to introduce some concept of aliases at the high level, instead of duplicating a lot of plugins, such as INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_TRX and INFORMATION_SCHEMA.NEWNAME_TRX.