Bruce, The naming of deity is a philosophical issue, not a technical one. Back when there was a debate (of sorts) between you and Ian Jackson in running for project leadership, the point was raised that technical decisions could and should often be limited to a knowledgeable cabal of people close to the issue in question. In programming and technical design issues there is some hope of reaching an objective solution to a given problem, though I admit that partisan hackers to get "religious" about certain types of solutions. But the argument over the naming of deity increasingly shows that there is simply a gulf between you and some of the other developers regarding who the think our market is, who we think it should be, and how sensitive that market is to terminology like "daemon" or "deity". I don't think this is something that can be proven one way or the other. Given that, I think an attempt at consensus among the developers, on the basis of one person, one vote, is the only truly fair solution. If we pick a dud name, we can always change it later. You mentioned the example of Microsoft earlier. If they can change the name of their MUA from Mail to Express to Outlook, surely we can be forgiven a name change in the event that we've miscalculated the demographic of our user base. That said, I think the best solution is to leave the naming in the hands of those who feel the strongest personal identification with the source code (Brian, Behan, et al.). If they don't particularly care, then it should be delegated to the project leadership, if you don't agree with my democratic method, or to the developers as a group, if you do. Finally and peripherally, I don't think your point about bitchx is a very good one. While I agree that it will be a less "visible" app than our packaging front-end, I don't think the kind of folks who would get upset over the name of a package are particularly going to notice or care whether it was developed "in-house" or came from outside the Debian Project. We'll get tarred with the brush of profanity equally in either case; people aren't going to get irrationally offended by the name of a piece of software and then switch on the powers of discernment and reasoning when it comes time to point the finger of blame. -- G. Branden Robinson | I just wanted to see what it looked like Purdue University | in a spotlight. branden@purdue.edu | -- Jim Morrison http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |
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