Debian and code names - pets or cattle

Posted Jul 3, 2019 22:19 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
In reply to: Debian and code names by ju3Ceemi
Parent article: Debian and code names

This reminds me of the pets/cattle distinction for naming computers.

Once upon a time we gave names to each computer - maybe using some theme like colors or composers or cartoon characters etc - just like we do for pets.
Now days we often have some many of the things that they are sa13-254 etc. Just like we might identify cattle.

Are distributions pets (you seem to think so, I might even agree) or cattle??

Debian and code names - pets or cattle

Posted Jul 4, 2019 2:42 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

"Pets v cattle" isn't a useful analogy for distributions. Why can't they be racehorses -- both individually cared for and yet with an eye to temporal matters. Or whales -- in that if you think you are controlling the whale, well I've got some news. Or maybe even imaginary creatures from a Pixar movie :-)

Debian and code names - pets or cattle

Posted Jul 12, 2019 8:46 UTC (Fri) by MiCRoPhoBIC (guest, #47807) [Link] (1 responses)

https://czep.net/17/legion-of-lobotomized-unices.html pretty much describes it.

Debian and code names - pets or cattle

Posted Jul 16, 2019 22:46 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

What a wonderful article. I suspect every software developer -- as opposed to, say, SREs or whatever they're called now -- has at least one system like this: the one on which she works. But nobody else works on it: they are alone there, and if they're not they probably have a VM in which they *appear* to be alone.

It does feel like something has been lost. Maybe we could get it some of it back, but I'm not sure how. (That world did have notable downsides, too: the bugger over there with a madly bloated Emacs pushing the machine deep into swap was too often, uh, me...)