Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote...
> We are about halfway through the buster development cycle, and a release
> update was overdue.
Thanks for all the updates, let's make this an exiting ride.
But briefly bleating by boldly bringing balking bits ...
> Future codenames
> ================
So we'll see three consecutives releases starting with the letter "b":
buster, bullseye, bookworm - quite funny and I reckon it's no
coincidence. However, it's bad idea.
There are people who don't follow every single action in Debian, plain
stables users for example. For them it's helpful to tell the releases
apart easily as they might not have the precise names and their order in
mind. The first letter is a fairly simple way to aid this.
Also, people who do any kind of work related to releases would likely
use the names as an identifier, directory and screen session names in my
case. Different starting letters speed up tab completion and similar
matching procedures. Just another letter to type (or even two for buster
vs. bullseye) might sound like nothing, but in the long run it shows.
I might switch to the release numbers then which gives a sad feeling of
loosing some color in the work.
Probably it's too late to revert the decision. But for future codenames
I'm asking you to choose names in a way these aspects are considered as
well - and I regret I never sent this mail right after the buster and
bullseye name announcement as I wanted to.
So, please use names that are really easy to tell apart. Having unique
initial letters among all supported release is an essential part of
it. Taking also the symlinks into account was worth a consideration
although this would block any name starting with "e", "o", "s", "t", or
"u".
Also, choosing the names in sorted order (modulo wraparound) would
create a list in historic order of the releases, easing some assessment
when talking about releases. That's what Ubuntu does, although using
consecutive letters is nice but not necessary in my opintion. And yes,
sid is a problem then. It would hit us in around the year 2055. I expect
to be stable by then. Stable six feet under.
Christoph
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