Re: [tiago@debian-ba.org: Re: New name: Call for opinions]
|--==> On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:42:47 +0200 (CEST), Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> said:
AT> On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Holger Levsen wrote:
>>I'm getting a bit annoyed by your repeatatly stated attitude, that the name
>>doesnt really matter, as long as its not CDD. Your main argument for this
>>seems to be that any name can be misunderstood.
AT> Not really. I just wanted to disprove the argumant that a name should
AT> contain an explanation. In many cases it does not. It is fine for me
AT> if this can be approached but this is not a general feature of a name.
You're right, but I feel that if a project's name does not provide a
precise definition of the project itself, than it should be
_completely_ unrelated to it, and not provide an approximate
definition.
I think a good example of a project's name completely unrelated with
the topic of the project is "Debian itself, which is a contraction of
the names of Debra and Ian Murdock, who founded the project. [0]
So if we want to go for a not-fully-explaining name, I would suggest
to pick something of completely unrelated, maybe followed by
"subtitle" like a one-line definition of the type Holger proposed.
By the way I've talked about this topic with Daniel James (my partner
at 64studio.com), and we both agreed that if we are seeking for a name
easier to be marketed, and easier to understand for non-tech people,
then we should probably avoid acronyms and a rather go for full
expressions like Debian Pure Blend or Debian Remix (Daniel just added
this last proposal the CDDNamingProposals wiki page).
>>Even though I'd like to be constructive and suggest a better name now, I'm not
>>sure if this is even a sensible approach. IMO we need to define the thing
>>first, and then look for a name. Do we have such a definition written down
>>somewhere? IMO this definition should also be short (while still complete),
>>three paragraphs at maximum, better two, even better one.
AT> Very good point!
AT> As you might know I tried kind of that in Extremadura and some raw sketch
AT> is at http://wiki.debian.org/CDDNamingProposals (Thingy 1)
AT> # customises Debian for specific user needs which might be special working fields or language specifics
AT> # adds some substructure to Debian (meta packages, specific debtags, etc.) which simplifies usage for the target user group
AT> # has a special team of people working inside Debian and as an instance to contact upstream authors of relevant software
AT> # does not use any extra pieces outside of the debian.org domain
AT> Way shorter is http://wiki.debian.org/CustomDebian
AT> a subset of Debian that is configured to support a particular target group out-of-the-box.
AT> This is what we formerly used to describe what CDD means. I would be happy
AT> if somebody with proper language skills could turn this into a real definition.
I'm much interested in finding a short, possibly one-line, definition
of the CDD concept. But before that (or in parallel with it) I think
we should also try to write down a complete technical specification of
what a CDD is (and here I mean strictly official and internal CDDs). I
think that would help in finding a good name for the project as well.
The best example that comes to my mind are the technical
specifications of a Debian package, found in the Debian policy and in
the dpkg documentation.
These specifications define exactly what a Debian package is, like
what the archive format of a .deb is or which fields must be present
in debian/control.
You can use the tool you want to create and build a debian package,
cdbs, dh-make, debhelper, or even manually with ar and maybe a
debian/rules written in plain C (in theory I think debian/rules is
only required to be an exacutable supporting certain command line
arguments like "binary" or "clean"). The only requirement for the
Debian package is to be consistent with the specifications.
In the same way there are several approaches, techniques tools to
build a CDD, but still no common technical specification which
precisely states what a CDD is supposed to be, so that at the end of
the day it is not yet clear what we are talking about.
Ciao,
Free
[0] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-basic_defs.en.html
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