A recent discussion popped up in the French l10n mailing list (http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2006/04/msg00539.html, in French) about the terminology to use for writing documentation and making reference to stable/testing/unstable in various parts of our documentation/web site and even packages (D-I for instance). The discussion is still not finished to decide what term we should use in our translations. We currently consistently use "distribution" which has the same meaning than the English word. However, when looking at various original documentation we have in the project about this, it appears that some more consistency could be achieved. "distribution" is sometimes used (as in http://www.debian.org/releases/) but so is "suite" (for instance in most code) and sometimes "version" The most commonly used term seems to be "distribution", as in the FAQ or most web pages that talk about stable/testing/unstable. I however find that this term is somewhat confusing as, for many outsiders, "distribution" is usually taken as a general term to talk about different operating systems distributions (or, more trivially speaking, about "Linux distributions") such as "the Mandriva distribution", "the Debian distribution" and the like. A good example of why this may be confusing is the installer. The debconf question that currently prompts users for choosing between stable/testing/unstable is labelled: "Debian version to install" dans says "Debian comes in several flavors...." The installer takes great care of being friendly to newcomers and it seems quite significant to me that this term was chosen....probably because "distribution" would have been too confusing. My personal opinion is that we should maybe use "branch" rather than "distribution" to avoid that confusion. This is what the French team is considering (there are some people who object to this, though). After all, from our users point of view and from what I see when people use Debian, they choose between stable, testing and unstable just as if they were choosing between various development branches of the same software. Of course, strictly speaking, testing is not a branch because it mostly automatically derives from unstable but the difference is not really obvious (and not really significant) for users. That would leave us with: Distribution: used to talk about Debian in general, whichever branch is used Branch (or suite): used to talk about stable, testing and unstable and explain differences between all of them or the ways they are developed Release : used to talk about the successive releases of Debian as a distribution: potato, woody, sarge....as well as the release updates Version : used when using numerical version numbers (3.1r2, etc..) I understand this is somewhat tricky and it may become very easy to nitpick about the assumptions I made above but I'd really like to see us accept that not everything is easy to understand from an outsider point of view, in our terminology. Comments welcomed (heh, I subscribed to -project just for this...) --
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