This extension, like all of our software, sprang from a personal need. The main development site we use started its life as a site migrated from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7 nearly 15 years before Onthos was conceived. It has gone through upgrades over all intermediate Joomla versions, and it's seen the rise and fall of several extensions and subextensions we produce, third party extensions we installed and removed, and so on and so forth. It's even seen its fair share of different servers and Operating Systems, not to mention so many PHP, MySQL, and MariaDB versions we've practically lost count.
Inevitably, it ended up with a lot of extensions muck. Cleaning it by hand became an increasingly tedious task and a massive headache.
Writing a script to clean the muck would work, but we had to also reliably detect what's muck and what's not without having to go through each extension manually.
Between that and the realisation that this is far from the only site to suffer this fate —we do see real world sites every single day doing support— we decided to do something about it, and something about it we did! We created Onthos, to detect and fix all those extension issues. Some of those issues we didn't anticipate to see on our main dev site, but they were there, hiding in plain sight all these years. What do you know!
Onthos is pronounced ON-thoss. The "th" sound is the same as in "theory". The stress is on the first syllable.
This is an Ancient Greek word (ὄνθος) which means animal dung, muck.
According to the legend, one of Hercules' feats was cleaning the dung from the stables of Augeas. The stables of Augeas were populated by immortal cattle which produced copious amounts of dung and had never been cleaned.
This component aims to clean the copious amounts of, well, dung accumulating on a site through a lifetime of updates, downgrades, and real world complications which are hard to imagine and even harder to reproduce in the clean lab environment used by Joomla! core maintainers when writing the extensions manager shipped with Joomla! itself. A Herculean task, indeed.