Re: [custom] The term "flavor" and encouraging work on Debian
> I don't mean any offense to you or your terms but I think that the
> major source of the confusion is not the the imprecision of the terms
> because (as other have pointed out) all terms are imprecise. The major
> problem is the *number* of these terms. Adding one or two more, even
> with their benefits, would IMHO be counteproductive at this point.
Agreed.
The reason I brought them up at all was that I think the other terms
don't always distinguish between (to borrow Fabian Fagerholm's terms)
organizational and technical categories (a "subproject" may equally mean a
bunch of people and a bunch of bits).
This is sometimes problematic. A particularly acute example: I'm in the
middle of packaging a game called CSP. CSP stands for Combat Simulator
Project -- is that a bunch of people or a bunch of bits? Project or
product? To exacerbate the problem, the acronym CSP has other well-known
meanings, too (Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes come to mind
immediately), so to disambiguate, I have taken to calling this game
CSPSim. Icing on the cake: sometimes even the construct "CSPSim project"
appears in communication, upsetting my linguistic sensibilities on each
such occasion.
The moral is, I guess, not to seek new terms but to use the already
existing ones carefully.
Cheers,
Istvan
PS: I don't really have anything more to add to this thread, it already
starts to feel a bit like "The Life of Brian", where the People's Front of
Judea prepare to attain world supremacy within the next five years: "We
could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever
speeches. It's not going to shift one Roman soldier!"
Just some free association on my part, no offense to anyone meant,
of course.
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