Re: branding debian releases
Morning,
I vaguely suspect that renaming the releases won't actually solve the
problem that it's meant to - reducing confusion among new Debian users.
You're likely to just end up with a new set of labels to explain. Any
name you come up with is going to be too short to fully explain the
situation: call stable 'server', testing 'desktop' for example, and you
still have to explain that the server release is good for desktops if
you prefer stability over new stuff, and the desktop release might be
good for a server if you need more recent packages and don't want to
search for backports. You can't fit all that info into a short name.
I run unstable on my desktop machine, stable on my mail server because
I know what the names mean. Education as to what goes in to the various
Debian releases is the key, and changing the release names doesn't do
much for that.
The current names for releases are pretty good, I think. The confusion
comes from not knowing what the names apply to, not the names
themselves. What's needed is not new names, but a rethink of the
descriptions of releases as at <http://www.debian.org/releases/>.
Instead of calling stable "the one which we primarily recommend using.",
perhaps call it "the one which we primarily recommend using when
stablity is your main need." Testing then might be "the one which we
primarily recommend using when up to date software is your main need.",
and unstable "the one which we primarily recommend using when you
want the very latest and are willing to sacrifice stability." Or
something like that. Explain what the release names mean more accurately,
rather than use new names that will still need explanation.
Tom
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