[I am not subscribed to debian-bsd.] On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 01:24:34PM -0600, Paul Baker wrote: > On Dec 13, 2003, at 3:27 PM, Branden Robinson wrote: > >Thus: > > > >Debian FreeBSD -> Debian Forneus (BSD) > >Debian NetBSD -> Debian Naberius (BSD) > >Debian OpenBSD -> Debian Orobos (BSD) > > While at first I did like these names (better than the tolkien ones > being tossed around now), but I fail to see how this addresses: > > >2) the comprehensibility of our OS names to the pubic. Thanks for asking; I should indeed have made this more clear. Basically, my reasoning is that "Debian GNU/KLNetBSD" has enough familiar terms in it that one is likely to try to parse it. "GNU...okay, yeah. NetBSD...yeah, okay, I know what that is. What's this KL business in the middle? What's KLNetBSD? Is that a version of NetBSD I haven't heard of? Has there been another fork?" Given that we're going to be saddled with with a comprehension problem anyway, I say we abandon the effort to be descriptive in the product name. I proposed having a correlation between the first letter of the product name and the underlying BSD variant simply as a mnemonic convenience for people who already know what the products are supposed to be. > And it does not necessarily address how there can be multple versions > of these when you differentiate by the libc used as well. That's true. I'd suggest using a different name that starts with the same letter. > I think sticking closer to the original idea of Debian GNU/KNetBSD is > actually the way to go, but perhaps the punctuation is what needs > tweaking. I know the first time I saw the uppercase K it immediately > made me think of KDE. For whatever reason this is what immediately > comes to mind when ever I see a uppercase K infront of an otherwise > familar name. And now the Gnome community has also started in the > practice of taking things that started with K to imply KDE and putting > a G infront instead[1]. > > What I propose to solve this is to lowercase the K. I think Debian > GNU/kNetBSD reads a little better. It takes the emphasis off the k. And > when adding the l for libc as well, Debian GNU/klNetBSD. Another option > may also be putting the k/l after the BSD. Debian GNU/NetBSDk and > Debian GNU/NetBSDkl. I find your proposal unesthetic, but not otherwise objectionable. My entire proposal is grounded on the notion the we might want to just get away from trying to pack the product name itself with descriptive data. People who don't share that notion are unlikely to find my proposal satisfactory. -- G. Branden Robinson | Debian GNU/Linux | De minimis non curat lex. branden@debian.org | http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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