Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 11, 2011 18:01 UTC (Tue) by mlinksva (guest, #38268)
In reply to: Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name by imgx64
Parent article: Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

I don't understand release names period. They make it harder to search, they're hard to remember, and are opaque to non-insiders. I can kind of remember Debian release names because Debian doesn't release often, but other project release names are hopeless for me, and I'd rather not have Debian release names in my head either.

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 11, 2011 18:11 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

release names make some sort of sense when there is a huge amount of development work going on and you don't know what the final released product is going to be called (either product name or version number)

but in the case of projects that release on a predictable time schedule and release numbers, there's really no point other than the 'coolness' factor.

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 11, 2011 22:15 UTC (Tue) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (2 responses)

there's really no point other than the 'coolness' factor

That's not enough?

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 11, 2011 22:36 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

>> there's really no point other than the 'coolness' factor

> That's not enough?

no it's not. it's not enough any more than 1337 talk being 'cool' is enough to have people start using it everywhere.

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 12, 2011 19:54 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Then there must be a non-zero cooling factor, and this one looks a zero.

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 11, 2011 18:50 UTC (Tue) by ianweller (guest, #57101) [Link] (2 responses)

I seem to remember someone in a Fedora IRC channel mentioning that the only reason we still have a release name is that we're almost certain someone's code will break if we change the format of /etc/fedora-release. ;)

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 11, 2011 19:09 UTC (Tue) by mlinksva (guest, #38268) [Link] (1 responses)

That's not really an excuse, as the "release name" used in such files could be the same as or derived from the version name, eg "Fedora17" or "F17". ;)

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 12, 2011 13:39 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Oh, come on. A bit of innocent fun is warranted after the hard work that goes into a release.

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Posted Oct 13, 2011 12:04 UTC (Thu) by valhalla (guest, #56634) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't agree on the harder to search part: if I search for debian 5.0 I can get any page where a 5.0 is mentioned, in any context; it is harder to find a page that mentions the strings "debian" and "squeeze" with the two not being related.

This probably works better for Debian, usually mentioned by release name, than it does for Fedora, which as far as I know is usually mentioned by release number. Ubuntu is something in between.

One thing that Ubuntu did right is choosing names that are in alphabetical order, so that it is easy to guess the age of a distro even if one does not remember the specific name.

release names

Posted Oct 13, 2011 19:09 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

It actually bugs me that when searching on a specific Ubuntu release I need to account for both number and name. It's definitely easier in Debian where it's all about the name; nobody ever seems to know or care about Debian release numbers. And I agree that the name is easier to search than the number is.