Re: branding debian releases
Hi,
Yes, I have some comments :). I myself do not consider unstable to be so
extremely unstable as the name suggests. Naming it DANGEROUS sounds like
over-exegarating it even more being some kind of whoppy system that
crashes every 10 minutes or so. It sounds like it will *hurt* your brand
new shiny PC :).
I think the first question is of which user you want to attract. A good
system admin knows what stable/testing/unstable means, but if you want to
atract John Doe to run Debian as a desktop, we need to think a different
way. If you need to attract sysadmins, the stable/testing/unstable naming
schema is sufficient.
First of all, John Doe always wants the latest packages. He wants to be
able to play DVD's, MP3's, AVI's, surf the Web, read his email and create
a letter or resume in some kind of Word processor which is
Word-compatible. But he also wants it to just *run*. Stable.
Nowadays, if a John Doe comes up to me and asks me what distro to use, I
must honestly say I will not tell him to go the Debian-way. Too
complicated, and the stable distro is way too much out of date. I would
suggest Knoppix instead for instance. Unstable is a no-go although it has
proven stable to me, it does sometimes haves its quircks when upgrading
and is thereby not suitable for John Doe.
So in my opinion, Debian is not really ready for John Doe, except for when
he has a nice cousin who knows Debian and can install a good unstable box
for him (and maintain it) :). This approach works well for businesses,
where they have sysadmins installing the systems for the John Does in the
company. But for a home user, I will not suggest Debian.
Anyway, I think changing the naming scheme is not of real use at this
moment. It will not help John Doe, and the sysadmins do not need it.
However, I can imagine you want to attract sysadmins coming from a
different background (Windows f.i.!) willing to try the Linux-way. Would
be sure nice if they give Debian a proper try. If you want these people to
understand stable/testing/unstable you *could* think of different naming.
However, I think a prominent FAQ document on the same pages as INSTALL
docs and download locations on the Debian sites would be more helpfull.
My suggestions for new names:
Stable --> CURRENT_STABLE
Testing --> ALMOST_STABLE
Unstable --> NEW_NOT_PROVEN
Above gives the user a little more info, but a good FAQ would be far more
helpfull.
Comments more than welcome too :)
Pim Bliek
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