Re: [offtopic] Earth calling Steve... (was: Re: Naming of new 2.0 release )

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

[milk metaphor deleted]
> >Debian CDs are almost exactly analogous to this.
> 
>     Yeah, and?  Anyone who takes the time to read "2.0" versus "2.0.1" is
> going to see "2.0r1" and react almost the same.  So you still have a putrid
> color, now it is a sickly purple instead of green.  Big whoop, the same thing
> happens.

Would you be bitterly disappointed if you found that you had received 2.0 
instead of 2.0 r1, or would you just shrug, and think ``oh well, that probably 
means half an hour on Internet'' ?

If your answer is ``bitterly disappointed'' then you apparently know little 
about Debian, which explains why you persist in your point of view.

If on the other hand you answer ``shrug'', then you should agree that the 
right emphasis for the revision information is on the back of the box, in 
small type (like a sell-by date) rather than emblazoned across the front of 
the box.

You are wanting us to indulge in the sort of deception that washing powder 
manufacturers indulge in, when they plaster ``New and Improved'' across the 
front of the box, when the contents are to all intents and purposes 
indistinguishable from the old one.

You seem to agree that there is no actual difference between the information
content of 2.0.1 and 2.0 r1,  but for some reason you refuse to accept the
fact that the CD vendors say that there is a perceived difference.

It is the CD vendors job to know if this is the case, so I bow to their wisdom 
on this point.  The fact that the most successful marketing machine on the 
planet agrees with them (i.e.  W95  OSR2) might tell you something here.

So we just need to decide which of the two schemes best reflects reality.

The answer is 2.0 r1, because this is perceived as a smaller difference,
which is good, because there really isn't much difference (much less than
is normally the case for adjacent releases of software products).

As an example, take the announcement of hamm-jp:

    Keita> We, Debian JP Project (http://www.debian.or.jp), have
    Keita> officially released add-on distribution for Debian 2.0
    Keita> called "hamm-jp" on August 25 JST.

Do you really want to encourage ``Is this still compatible with 2.0.1?'' 
questions, or would you prefer that people assume that it's going to work
with 2.0 r1, because 2.0 r1 IS ``Debian 2.0'' ?

Cheers, Phil.

P.S.  Please don't take the Win95 reference as an excuse to say ``See, 
Microsoft do it, so it must be evil!''.  In the case of W95 it is evil,
because there are significant differences between OSR1 & 2, and upgrading is 
non-trivial.  Debian is different.