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Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll
Voting for the Fedora 18 release names has begun. You can find the potential names in the voting application: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/ If you are a Fedora contributor (defined as having signed the FPCA and being in one other Fedora group in the account system) then you are eligilbe to vote. This cycle, the Board is also asking contributors to let us know if we should continue to have release names for future Fedora releases. Even though the interface is the same, this portion is intended to be a poll rather than a straight up vote. The Fedora Board will look at the answers to determine if enough contributors value continuing to create release names to make it worthwhile in the future. If it does seem desirable, the Board will likely look into forming a working group to come up with a new method for creating release names for future releases. The poll for keeping release names is also found in the voting application: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/ Eligibility to answer the poll is the same as for being able to vote on the names themselves (having signed the FPCA and being in one other group). -Toshio -- announce mailing list announce@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/announce (Log in to post comments)
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 20, 2012 23:39 UTC (Fri) by mricon (subscriber, #59252) [Link]
Release naming should be discontinued for the following reasons:
1. Though the names are solicited from project members, legal ultimately has to approve the final selection to make sure that we're not stepping on any trademarked toes. This pretty much assures that only proper names or non-sensical names end up on the final approved list.
2. The art team probably feels constrained by having to force their creative process to reflect whatever the final release name is. With only proper names or joke names making it on the list, I feel many of them are getting frustrated.
3. With "Beefy Miracle" the naming has become a farce anyway, which I see has not improved in F18 with Ketchy Ketchup and Tandoori Chicken.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 0:26 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
If you thought Beefy Miracle was bad, just think of the "Hotdog Stand" color scheme of Windows 3.1. :)
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 1:02 UTC (Sat) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]
Release naming should be continued for the following reasons:
1. It's fun. People enjoy doing it. You can particularly see it with Beefy Miracle. Everybody remembers that name. What was F16 named again?
2. It gives the release a personality. And personalities fit way nicer into stories. Which is both good for remembering things about the release and for telling things about it. Do you remember when Linux 2.6.29 was released? What about the release with the Tasmanian devil logo?
3. It gives all the bikeshedders and stop energy people a place to vent. So rather than discouraging important things (like systemd, pulseaudio or GNOME 3), they can debate if "Beefy Miracle" or "Ketchy Ketchup" are acceptable release names.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 8:59 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] You can particularly see it with Beefy Miracle. Everybody remembers that name....for the wrong reasons. Everybody remembers Microsoft Bob, but that doesn't mean the project or the name was a success. It gives all the bikeshedders and stop energy people a place to vent.This is a good point; Larry Wall said the same thing about the Perl 6 logo.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 4:32 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
.. and this is the first time in all of history that Fedora had a nickname that people actually remembered.
> Tandoori Chicken.
I vote for this one. I had some for lunch for delicious.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 4:32 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
I have never understand these ridiculous release names in most (all?) Linux distributions. They are extremely counterproductive for anybody who doesn't spend 80% of their time involved with the particular distribution/community but still has to interact with it.
I don't have specific experience with Fedora, but it has gotten completely absurd with Ubuntu. I am a Ubuntu user on some of my computers, but I can't (and don't care to) remember a silly distribution name that changes every six months. I especially hate it when I have actual work to do and instead of brief practical version numbers I see names. (e.g. http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=gcc )
Maveric? Hardy? Natty? Which is which? Which came first? Utter idiocy.
It has gotten completely absurd. Insane. Insanely annoying. Aaaargh. I can just barely tolerate it in Debian because it is one new name every three years...
So, I sincerely hope that Fedora, with its reputation of a serious "professional" distribution can get away from this.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 4:39 UTC (Sat) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
> Maveric? Hardy? Natty? Which is which? Which came first? Utter idiocy.
ummm.....I don't want to sound like Captain Obvious here (or respond to a troll), but not only are the Ubuntu versions strictly dates (2-digit-year.month) but the codenames are alphabetical. L ucid, M averic, N atty, O neric, P recise.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 5:00 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
Yes I am a well known troll, thank you.
But pray tell, where within the string "Natty" do you see a numeric version? Or in the example page I linked to?
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 5:40 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Is Windows 8 before the Windows 2008? And what about Windows 3.11?
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 5:44 UTC (Sat) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
Why is everyone using Windows 7 when Windows 95 is out?
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 6:17 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
Flawless logic. If Microsoft does it for Windows every 5 years, surely the same naming scheme makes perfect sense for a free Linux distribution with 0.001% of the users and a 6-month release cycle. But of course simple numbers like 2000 or 95 or 2008 are way too dull and every user MUST remember at all times a list of 20 nonsensical word combinations - otherwise they don't deserve to use our distribution.
That's a winning strategy right there.
Oh, by the way, how often do you use RHEL release names? When was the last time you saw "Red Hat Santiago" used instead of "RHEL 6"?
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 12:06 UTC (Sat) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]
>But pray tell, where within the string "Natty" do you see a numeric version? Or in the example page I linked to?
I googled "ubuntu name natty" sans the quotes. The first page to pop up?
Was that so tough?
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 13:31 UTC (Sat) by udp (guest, #80701) [Link]
I think the point is that you shouldn't _have_ to google anything to compare two versions.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 15:46 UTC (Sat) by Thanatopsis (guest, #14019) [Link]
As scientes pointed out you do not have to. Ubuntu releases are alphabetical. Easy to tell where a release is relative to another. It is clear from the link I posted that the "silly" names are used only during development as the release date used for the official name is not known.
That said, no one really uses them. I'm posting this from Fedora 16, not Verne. Before F16 I ran F11 not Leonidas. I was pointing out to mikov that on the rare occasion someone refers to a release by a name instead of a number you can discover what you desire by taking a whopping 3.5 seconds out of you busy schedule.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 16:39 UTC (Sat) by udp (guest, #80701) [Link]
I've been using Ubuntu for years, and I had no idea the release names were alphabetical until reading this discussion.
Version numbers are a convention that everyone understands.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 22, 2012 12:38 UTC (Sun) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
The Ubuntu ones certainly aren't; lots of people don't realise that they're date based. That doesn't stop it being a good system (much like alphabetical code names), but you still need to take the minimal trouble to understand the way it works.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 20:56 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
How often do you really need to compare two version numbers? And what does the comparison tell you? I mean, if I say I'm using Wigwam Linux v4.3, you won't have the faintest idea whether that release is five years old, or two weeks. And if someone else says they're using Wigwam Linux v6.1, well, yes, you probably know that's newer than the version I'm using, but how does that help you or anyone else? Maybe Wigwam releases new versions weekly, and both those versions are from 2004.
If you want to get any useful information from a version number, you're probably going to have to turn to google anyway, and googling numbers is no fun.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 21:15 UTC (Sat) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
precisely, yet if you go to the url that mikov mentioned ( http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=gcc ) you actually get something a little more useful and possibly more memorable: the version of gcc the system is compiled with.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 23:16 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
Your assertion seems to be that release names and versions numbers are equally useless, so we might as well use something silly and fun.
I have to disagree on two counts however:
- Ubuntu version numbers, being a year and month, are very informative and useful. They are brilliant, actually.
- Release names, on the other hand, are very hard to remember, especially for non native English speakers. I can easily remember 11.10 but "Oneiric Ocelot" might as well be "Blebliah Blobleliebhu"; both sound like gibberish to me the first time I hear them. They are non-translatable and un-pronounceable in other languages.
Internal code names are good, but release names should be publicly visible only if they are associated with a real marketing campaign and are not more frequent than once every couple of years.
This is simply common sense, and frankly I am shocked at the opposition.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 13:53 UTC (Mon) by AAP (guest, #721) [Link]
In fact, I have a mental block on the name of the current Ubuntu release. My mind keeps thinking "Ornery Onslot", even though I know that's not right. And I keep thinking the next one should be some sort of Penguin. :p
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 19:40 UTC (Mon) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
You say the version numbers are useful, and to support this theory, you...say they're useful. Looks a bit like circular reasoning to me. Can you provide some realistic examples of their utility? (And just so you know, I think that versioned dependencies should be on tools, not distros, and preventing people from declaring versioned dependencies on entire distros is actually a Good Thing(tm).)
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 20:06 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
when talking to someone, it's a lot easier to say "I'm using Ubuntu 12.04" than to say I'm using a distro with these library versions:
linux-vdso.so.1
and have to give different sets of libraries for each program you are using.
applications should not depend on specific distro versions, but for users and support people the one version number encapsulates a very large number of specific versions
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 9:53 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]
It's straightforward. Debian ended up with release names because a CD vendor took code that wasn't ready and packaged it on their CD as "Debian 1.0".
To get round this, Debian moved to using code names for unreleased code and numbers for released versions. Bruce Perens was working at Pixar so the first release got a Toy Story character name. This has since become a tradition - as each Debian release is released, the Release Manager gets to choose the character for the next release name. In fact, of course, if you've been working with Wheezy as Debian Testing for a couple of years and it's released as Debian 7.0, the codename and number are essentially equivalent.
Ubuntu took this from Debian - but the release names aren't strictly alphabetical - Warty Warthog was the first.(5.04)
Does SUSE / OpenSUSE even have release names - they seem to do date based internally but major number based externally: unless you run SUSE extensively, would you care whether it's 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 ?
Red Hat release names are essentially irrelevant, since people bother about point releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 only if they have "stuff" that only runs on one specific kernel version. Red Hat update policy suggests that you keep your systems patched to "current 5" or "current 6" anyway. Red Hat version names really are for internal Red Hat development processes only - it's probably irrelevant to expose them to the wider world as in any sense meaningful.
Fedora - pointless to have a release name controversy every six months, IMHO.
[Mindless bias]
Nobody cares which version of Fedora you run anyway - you install Fedora, run it for a couple of months, file bugs to be fixed sometime in a future release, do a complete reinstall every 6 months (since upgrading doesn't work for Red Hat based products) - and hope your bugs gradually get knocked out or filed as irrelevant because they no longer apply 12 months later.
Fedora: Bleeding edge for extreme enthusiasts/developers only and for Red Hat to cherry pick odd features from very occasionally: do not use Fedora on a machine you care about: never use in production or for a server.
[/Mindless bias]
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 18:17 UTC (Sat) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I've mostly been able to upgrade from one Fedora to the next without too much trouble, so the "full reinstall each 6 months" isn't everybody's experience.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 18:44 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
I can't upgrade because my /boot partition is too small for preupgrade to write all the packages there, and installing from a network connection always hangs. I expect that upgrading from a CD would work, tho' it feels a bit retro.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 22, 2012 13:50 UTC (Sun) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]
Preupgrade writes packages to /, not /boot.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 22, 2012 14:09 UTC (Sun) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] IIRC, it's actually in
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 22:37 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Does SUSE / OpenSUSE even have release names?
(earlier: nameless), 11.2 Emerald, 11.3 Teal, 11.4 Celadon, 12.1 Asparagus, 12.2 Mantis (TBA). It is shown in login deco (if at all), i.e. /etc/issue and maybe kdm (which I don't run), but it does not see significant use otherwise. That sort of keeps things professional.
>they seem to do date based internally but major number based externally: unless you run SUSE extensively, would you care whether it's 11.1, 11.2, 11.3
The version number is not based on anything, but the one important property is that it increases monotonically (leads to comparable/ordered set). Starting with post-12.1, a wraparound to y.1 after x.3 was decided on.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 22, 2012 0:54 UTC (Sun) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143) [Link]
A properly chosen release name can be very beneficial when looking up distro+version specific issues. There are not many webpages that mention the words "natty" and "linux" without pertaining to the ubuntu release!
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 22, 2012 1:08 UTC (Sun) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
I am not convinced it is the most important factor to optimize for, but I have to admit that this is a very good point.
I would be perfectly happy if name + version was used universally, or at least in important system related places.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 5:27 UTC (Sat) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]
With one exception - Spherical Cow - which I'm a little surprised got passed the Trademark check.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 9:37 UTC (Sat) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
> 3. With "Beefy Miracle" the naming has become a farce anyway,
> which I see has not improved in F18 with Ketchy Ketchup and > Tandoori Chicken.
It also totally discriminates vegetarians, who the hell makes up those names?
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 11:26 UTC (Sat) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] I'm a vegetarian and I could care less. Personally I hope they avoid the word "bacon" for the next name only because at this point is is an overused meme.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 16:41 UTC (Sat) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
I am also a vegetarian, and I love 'Beefy Miracle'. If you think it is crap, you should install the "hotdog" Plymouth theme, so that your boot splash will be a grinning hot dog, with mustard as a status bar. Then you will see how hilarious it really is. :)
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 7:48 UTC (Mon) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
How the hell does a release name discriminate anyone?
Unless we name it "vegetarians are morons" (even that wouldn't be a discrimination but a insult ... and now one would every argue for such a name) this argument is just stupid.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 8:19 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Release names can easily discriminate. Cows are for instance, considered sacred among Hindus which is a dominant religion in India, Nepal and other places and one can easily see how 'Beefy Miracle' isn't the most appropriate name if you want to appeal to that audience. I don't personally care but I think a global project should be careful about such matters and Fedora could do a much better job than now.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 10:42 UTC (Mon) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
> Cows are for instance, considered sacred among Hindus
"beefy miracle" sounds just fine for holy cows to me ;-) (SCNR)
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 11:24 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] »Beef« is the meat, not the animal. If the actual cows are holy to you rather than their protein, then a »bovine miracle« might be closer to what you're looking for. On the other hand, I wonder whether there are in fact bona-fide Hindus who refuse to install Fedora 17 on account of the code name, or whether the people claiming that »Beefy Miracle« is offensive to Hindus are really non-Hindus being politically hyper-correct on the off-chance.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 15:21 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Plus I think they are being racist against hotdogs.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 16:21 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
FWIW, I was born a Hindu (although I no longer share any religious belief beyond cultural affinity) and I know for a fact that 'Beefy Miracle' is considered a unpleasant name at best by several people around me. So this isn't merely political correctness. I wouldn't say everyone who is a Hindu would be offended or even bothered by it but enough people are, to consider such matters when discussing and selecting release names in a international project.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 17:27 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
Beefy implies a multitude of bovine muscle tissue, it does not imply that said tissue is meant for human consumption, or even that it is not part of a living, breathing cow. It is often used figuratively, «that guy is really beefy» means that somebody is very muscular, not that he resembles a dead cow. A beefy miracle could just as well be a beautiful cow, a muscular holy person or a delicious steak. It should also be mentioned that almost all hot dogs are made from pork, not beef, which should even further lessen the argument that the name beefy miracle implies violence against cows.
All in all, pretty much every single person who has spoken up against «beefy miracle» seems to be a non-vegetarian, non-Hindu westener with a myopic sense of humor, vast amounts of spare time to spend arguing on the Internet and an excess of stop energy. «Hindus might be insulted» seems to be an excuse to spew negativity rather than a factual argument.
Normal people don't care, even if they happen to be vegetarian Hindus.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 11:23 UTC (Mon) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
> Release names can easily discriminate. Cows are for instance, considered sacred among Hindus which is a dominant religion in India, Nepal and other places and one can easily see how 'Beefy Miracle' isn't the most appropriate name if you want to appeal to that audience.
Yeah in that case it might offend them but there is no discrimination here. The release name does not limit the feature set for a specific kind of people (which is what discrimination is all about).
"Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership - or perceived membership - in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group"[1]
There is no way you can do that with a release name.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 15:10 UTC (Mon) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
Yes, wrong word.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 14:44 UTC (Mon) by ean5533 (subscriber, #69480) [Link]
The name "beefy miracle" is discriminatory toward vegetarians in the same way that it is discriminatory toward people who don't believe in miracles.
(i.e. it isn't)
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 16:26 UTC (Mon) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]
I'm a vegetarian, but frankly it's the lameness of the name that offends me, not the fact that it includes meat.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 21:02 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
If I remember correctly, a bunch of art team members where behind the beefy miracle naming because they thought it was a genuinely funny theme that they wanted to work on. Please don't speak for anyone but yourself without checking that you actually represent their opinion first.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 23, 2012 22:48 UTC (Mon) by mricon (subscriber, #59252) [Link]
"Beefy Miracle" is an inside joke that should have stayed inside, thanks.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 13:08 UTC (Sat) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]
According to google insights, distros with release names appear to be much more popular than the others. Wonder if the association of the distro with a vivid image or a character may have to do with it.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 14:13 UTC (Sat) by LightDot (guest, #73140) [Link]
Perhaps it was the other way around in the beginning, popular distributions have a greater user base that spends more time working within a community and therefore seek for various ways to also have fun within a same group of people. I'd say choosing a more or less silly release name falls in this category. It's fun, it's a bit silly, it's creative.
But, true, a release name also has a marketing factor, so it makes the distribution more popular... And around we go... A bit of a chicken an egg problem. So unless the original motivation for Fedora release names is publicly known, it's hard to say.
Who came up with the idea, anyway? Speak up, man! Was it just in a continuation of Red Hat's tradition?
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 21, 2012 17:01 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]
I don't think release names as used in Linux distributions have any marketing factor at all. They change way too frequently and there aren't any real marketing materials associated with them, so ordinary users (to the extent they exist) don't know or care about them.
It is especially bad for non native English speakers. As one of them, I guarantee you that the Ubuntu release names sound like utter gibberish. The Fedora names are apparently not much better. It is nothing at all like "XP", "Vista" or "2000" :-)
So, I am convinced that release names are simply tolerated because of the distribution's popularity, but they are not contributing to it in any way.
The situation would be much better if version numbers were used consistently together with release names, but at least in Ubuntu's case they are not.
Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll Posted Apr 22, 2012 12:42 UTC (Sun) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] "ordinary users [...] don't know or care about them"Distributions don't rely on 'ordinary users' for their continued existence though, they rely on contributors. If the release names give the contributors a nice warm fuzzy feeling, and strengthen their in group dynamic, and they can do that without ordinary users knowing or caring, then that it a good thing.
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