Re: Frustration over Debian naming (was: Re: Meltdown fix for wheezy-backports)
On Fri 12 Jan 2018 at 14:01:34 (+0000), Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Fri, 2018-01-12 at 13:54 +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 08:49:05AM -0500, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
> > > But the various names and use of those names gets very frustrating
> > > for me, and
> > > I suspect I am not the only one. The numbered versions, the Toy
> > > Story names,
> > > and then the testing, stable, old stable, old old stable is just
> > > frustrating.
> >
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history explains this
> > nicely and is linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian
>
> I took their point to be that if one needs a wiki page to follow the
> versioning scheme then perhaps the versioning scheme has an issue.
I disagree with that, and with the view that you don't need 3½
schemes to describe the situation. That page is a useful summary
for people unfamiliar with the schemes and their relationships.
I would prefer, however, that buster were not described as 10,
nor bullseye 11, just as buzz was not released as version 1.0.
> IIRC teams like the Press Team have a policy of always leading with the
> numerical version rather than the code names, presumably for this very
> reason,
Which reason? The formal name of a release is the Release number.
As point releases are issued, the Release number changes; the
code name doesn't. When a release becomes ancient history, its
code name still applies to it and the all its point releases,
whatever numbering scheme is then in force.
> but that doesn't carry over into "casual" conversation like the
> parent thread or the repo urls etc.
No, for several reasons which may differ between people. In this
specific case, wheezy-backports packages are packaged for
installation on wheezy systems, but they're not part of any
Debian [0-9]+ release; using a Release number (which one?) would
carry misleading implications.
Another reason: it's a convention that organisations use
because it works. It's less ambiguous to write jessie than 8
especially in contexts where lots of numbers are being discussed,
and it's more memorable to most people. People use names,
computers like numbers.
As for stable etc, at the users' end, they're designed to give
a seamless path for any particular system to evolve through the
upgrade process. At the developers' end, they provide static
handles for the discussion of how packages migrate through the
repositories. LTS is somewhat similar.
Some people always seem to remain confused. Perhaps they have
the same confusion with timezones, for similar reasons.
Cheers,
David.
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