Distributions quotes of the week

[Posted November 6, 2024 by jzb]

The number "42" is a significant part of the story of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a classic series of satirical science fiction written by Douglas Adams. It has a long and enduring history in the geek lexicon, and it seems to me like the Fedora Project would be missing a tremendous opportunity to have a little fun with it.

I'd like to propose that we consider bringing back the old Fedora codenames just this once and declare the release "Fedora 42 (Adams)", ideally with a few subtle nods snuck in to the artwork for the release.

— Stephen Gallagher

Yes, could be a nice "one off" special.

For context, I was trying to remind myself of the various reasons why we stopped doing release names originally. Sadly a lot of Fedora's historical record appears to be lost from moving and/or discontinuing services :-(

— Daniel P. Berrangé

Fedora 42

Posted Nov 7, 2024 10:32 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link] (2 responses)

> I'd like to propose that we consider bringing back the old Fedora codenames just this once and declare the release "Fedora 42 (Adams)"

"Towel" was forgotten, I guess.

K3n.

Fedora 42

Posted Nov 7, 2024 13:06 UTC (Thu) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]

Never oopses if installed on May 25 as username "ford".

Fedora 42

Posted Nov 7, 2024 13:47 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link]

According to the radio programme, the towel is

the most worthwhile thing in Ford’s possession [and] something he acquired from the Salisbury branch of Marks & Spencers.

The store is still there, on the same site, if rather larger than it was. I can't help feeling there must be an opportunity there.

Historical record

Posted Nov 7, 2024 16:03 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (3 responses)

> Sadly a lot of Fedora's historical record appears to be lost from moving and/or discontinuing services :-(

This is one of the things I like the most about Debian: things like mailing list messages from the early 1990s are still available, and their archive URL hasn't changed in over a decade; a quick look through archive.org at the earliest archived month for debian-devel shows that it's unchanged since at least 2009 (probably more, 2009 was just the earliest archive.org capture of that page).

I feel the same about Mozilla's bugzilla instance, which has 20 year old issues that are still in the same place.

Historical record

Posted Nov 8, 2024 9:12 UTC (Fri) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

It's still entirely possible to migrate services and leave archives behind: GNOME moved all its mailing lists to Discourse, but the old mailman archives are still available. The same thing happened to the GNOME Bugzilla, which has been turned into static websites after the migration to GitLab, and it's happening again with the wiki, which has been archived this month.

Yes, searching is somewhat harder, but you can still point any reasonable search engine to a static website and get relevant results even in the age of AI hallucinating stuff.

Historical record

Posted Nov 9, 2024 6:57 UTC (Sat) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Heh, I came here to wonder about this as well and also point out the reliability of mailing lists.

Historical record

Posted Nov 10, 2024 8:52 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Actually debian mailing list archive URL have not changed since about 1999!