* Wichert Akkerman (wichert@wiggy.net) wrote: > Previously Stephen Frost wrote: > > Right, bringing in politics is useless and counter-productive, so why > > are you? Choosing amd64 isn't political, it's the argument about what > > to call it and why is political. I agree that we should just pick a > > name that will not confuse people- that's not x86-64/x86_64 which *will* > > be confusing to people as to which it is or will cause problems with our > > various tools. > > Lets look at other big distributions: > > Redhat: x86-64 (or 'Intel EM64T & AMD64' in their whitepapers) > SuSE: x86_64 (or 'AMD/Intel 64-bit processors') > Gentoo: amd64 > Mandrake: AMD64 > > So the two biggest ones picked x86-64 (ignoring the - vs _). Slackware > and Conectiva do not support the architecture at the moment. Which means > that the vast majority of Linux users will know and recognize x64-64. Right, and the people who go out and *buy* the processors will see amd64 on them and not see x86-64 anywhere. Sounds just great. > Now lets look at what developers will encounter: > > kernel x86_64 > gcc x86_64 > binutils x86_64 > > So all developers chose x86_64. No, obviously not unless you consider the Gentoo, Mandrake and *Debian* developers who chose amd64. Those Debian developers also being the vast majority of the people who *worked* on the port. > Looking at that data it seems obvious that the Linux/free software community > has made its choice and overwhelmingly selected x86[_-]64. So why does > Debian want to different and pick a name that no developer uses and > users will not recognize from popular other distributions? So Gentoo and Mandrake aren't popular and the Debian developers and users don't count? False statements can imply anything, it'd be much more interesting if you were a bit more creative at least. Stephen
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