On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 03:09:07PM -0500, Nathan Hawkins wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 12:19:10PM -0700, Joel Baker wrote:
> >
> > 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):
>
> You mean you had to look this up? ;-)
I said I was a geek; I didn't say I had a good memory. :)
> > 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
>
> There's no particular reason to stay with 'F'. We're already changing
> the name beyond recognition. 'V' would be close enough, the phonetic
> difference is small.
True. I was mostly trying to stay along the lines of the origional
proposal, but I doubt that too many folks will object very heavily to
whatever the FreeBSD ports choose, since the primary mapping will be on a
webpage somewhere (like, the BSD ports page, I'd expect, at least once
the webpages are building again) anyway.
> > 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)
>
> Last I heard there was no longer an OpenBSD port.
True; it was more for the sake of completeness.
> > 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.
>
> This is a solution I can live with. Just to clarify something, am I
> correct in understanding that we're only being asked to change the
> official name of the system, not what uname says or config.guess says?
Correct, at least as far as I understand it. Certainly those fields are
a reflection of a technical statement roughly equivalent to "We use the
NetBSD kernel", which is a factual statement that wouldn't infringe on any
trademarks. I expect that they would expect them to be distinct, of course
(though the topic has never directly come up), but we already have that
(being a fundamental necessity).
It has been mentioned in the threads I pointed them at, so I expect that
if they care at all, we'll know about it by the end of the week. But the
*only* request they made was in regards to the official naming of the port
- not even the 'architecture' name. Though it might be vaguely entertaining
to have 'nienna-i386' someday. But I'll leave that for a later debate.
> Would TNF be ok with describing the system as "Debian GNU/Nienna, based
> on the NetBSD(tm) kernel?" People will still need to know that the
> system is based on NetBSD.
Except that that wouldn't be the correct statement, yes, every indication
is that it is fine to make factual statements such as this (the correct
statement would be "Debian Nienna, based on the NetBSD kernel and libc,
and a GNU userland").
This has the side effect of removing "GNU" from the name, just as "NetBSD"
is removed from it (and presumably, someday "Linux" may well be removed;
until then, of course, it would still be "Debian GNU/Linux"). Which isn't a
direct goal in any sense, but does allow us to also avoid the same question
of trademark issues with anyone else.
> If we use different names for the libc vs glibc ports, we should
> probably set the names for dpkg and apt to match. (i.e. netbsd-i386 ->
> nienna-i386.)
As I noted above, this may not be unreasonable, but I'd like some feedback
from the general populance, the dpkg/apt maintainers, the ftpmasters, and
the leadership about whether this should be expected to eventually subsume
all port naming at some future point when it's reasonably convenient,
before we start asking for that. Even if the answer is "no", we should
spend some time figuring out just how far the name should extend, in
order to not completely confuse everyone.
(Disclaimer of ulterior motive: if it does subsume Linux naming, it would
mean that we'd have <linux name>-i386 as the arch, and 'i386' would just be
a legacy pointer to it - something I'd like to see someday anyway :)
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU/KLNetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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