On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 08:15:04AM -0700, Joel Baker wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 11:01:49AM +0100, David Weinehall wrote:
>
> > Of course, I don't really think we should merit religious nonsense with
> > the honour of giving name to the products of Debian labour anyway...
> > And if we do, let's choose one of the religions noone believes in...
> > Branden's second proposal of using something from Pratchett did have a
> > nice ring to it, and then there's always the valar.
>
> Actually, given that I'm a long-time and deep-seated Tolkien geek, I rather
> like the notion of using the Valar - they're fictional, and Tolkien's work
> isn't yet out from under copyright, but they *are* reasonably well-known
> (Okay, not as well as Pratchett, but better than Christian demonology),
> and if we're liable to get in trouble over using just the names, we should
> probably strongly reconsider our use of Toy Story character names for
> tagging distributions...
>
> Suppose it's time to dig out my reference books and see if I can come up
> with a suitable set of names out of that mythos.
>
> Besides, using Tolkien names is a long geek tradition.
Having cheated and grabbed an online resource for it from Google, the
following possibilities show up (my apologies for the lack of accents;
I can't easily input UTF-8 on this terminal):
FreeBSD:
No primary Vala names begin with 'F', but many alternate names do, as do
a great many other names of honor in the Tolkien mythos
NetBSD:
Namo (Vala of destiny, prophecy, and the Halls of the Dead)
Nessa (Valie of the woods)
Nieliqui (daughter of Orome; see OpenBSD)
Nienna (Valie of pity and lament; Gandalf/Mithrandir was one of her students)
OpenBSD:
Omar (Vala of music)
Orome (Vala of the hunt, teacher of elves)
This is by no means a complete list; it includes none of the Maiar, nor any
of the names of characters elevated from less powerful races. Personally,
while I can't speak for the FreeBSD or OpenBSD folks, I'd cast a vote for
Nienna, for the NetBSD port using kernel+libc; the name is one of the
better known ones, and is a far cry from anything remotely 'evil'.
It also leaves at least 3 other 'N' names available for the port currently
known as Debian GNU/KNetBSD.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU/KLNetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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