Capitalization conventions for Debian release names
Hi folks,
I'm beginning a second round of proofreading of the Debian Reference (aka
Qref).
Is there a consensus among documentation writers on how to handle Debian
release codenames (Slink, Potato, Woody, etc.)? Usage varies almost
randomly, it seems, even in publications like the Debian Weekly News,
where you can find "woody" and "Woody" in the same paragraph.
My feeling is that a Debian codename is a proper name, just like "Debian"
itself; where "Debian" (or "Debian/GNU") is the name of a specific Linux
distribution, "Woody" is the name of a specific release. It's parallel to the
way codenames are used elsewhere in the computing world: think Mozilla,
Chicago, Whistler (okay, don't think the last two...). And of course Debian
codenames are derived from the proper names of film characters, which are
always capitalized.
So my usage would be to capitalize these names and display them in regular
text font (i.e., no formatting tags like <tt>).
On the other hand, because "stable," "testing," and "unstable" are meta-names
that apply to different release states at different times. So I would encode
them: <tt>stable</tt>, etc.
Does that make sense to everyone?
DS
(Sorry I've been idle for a while. And Josip, I owe you an apology for calling
you "Jospin"--I must have had French politics on my brain.)
--
David Sewell, Project Editor
The University Press of Virginia
PO Box 400318, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4318 USA
Email: dsewell@virginia.edu Tel: 1 434 924-6066
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