How to avoid plugin name conflicts from the upgrade notifier?

I’ve wrapped a quick hack as a plugin to add Google Analytics to my site. Named it “Google Analytics” and, sure enough, WP offered me to upgrade my v0.1 plugin to some random plugin from the plugin repo.

I vaguely recall it getting raised a few times around WP 2.7 to 3.0. Is there a new API available somewhere to disable this, or is the only way to avoid it still is to prefix plugin names (not their file name, but their actual name as shown in the Plugins screen) to make them unique?

In my specific use case, the plugin is in mc-ga/mc-ga.php and is named “Google Analytics”, along with a few other meta fields at the beginning of the plugin file header. WP yields an update notice based on “Google Analytics” (I couldn’t locate a mc-ga.php plugin file in the repo).

Does WP allow to add an extra field I’m not aware of, e.g. a repo URL or something truly unique, so as to avoid such conflicts?

You can remove you plugin from the updateble list with:

add_action( 'plugins_loaded', function(){
    add_filter( 'site_transient_update_plugins', function ( $value ) 
    {
        if( isset( $value->response['google-analytics/google-analytics.php'] ) )
            unset( $value->response['google-analytics/google-analytics.php'] );
        return $value;
    });
});

Adding this filter will eliminate our homonymous plugin altogether from update checks. And it supposes that we are doing the updates manually via simple FPT uploads -or similar. But there are many factors, as discussed in If I rename a plugin (in its main php file) do I still get update notifications?. As per the OP description (same name, different slug), without using a filter, maybe the best is to set the plugin Version header to a greater number or using a less conventional number like yyyy.mm.dd.

If we are setting our own Repo, I believe there won’t be any conflicts.