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Fedora 18 Release name voting and pollFedora 18 Release name voting and pollPosted Apr 21, 2012 4:32 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)In reply to: Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll by mricon Parent article: Fedora 18 Release name voting and poll
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.
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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.
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