Debian or Ubuntu?

[Eric Dunbar]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:39:07 +0100, Shot (Piotr Szotkowski) wrote:
> 
> Shot (Piotr Szotkowski):
> 
> > - if Ubuntu's team meet their deadlines Ubuntu will support Warty until
> >   April 2006, Hoary between April 2005 and October 2006 and Grumpy
> >   between October 2006 and April 2007
>             ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> ...I meant October 2005, of course.

At the risk of sounding like a stick-in-the-mud:

I suggest the Ubuntu team consider relying a little LESS on code names
and more on OS versions.

Warty, Hoary, Grumpy, Dumpy, Lazy, Larky, Snorey... what's in a name?

Yes, they're neat and give a piece of software some character, BUT, to
people who don't keep up with all the lingo they're going to be
confusing.

By July of this year a trouble-shooter may ask a user:
"Are you running Warty, Hoary, or Grumpy?"
The user, "Huh? Warts, gumpiness? What the hell is 'hoary'?" I'm
running Ubuntu 5.4!

As a Mac user I find that I'm constantly having to look up what is
Panther (10.3), Tiger (10.4),  and Jaguar (10.2). If someone were to
say 10.2 I'd know exactly to what they're referring. If they were to
say "Jaguar" I'd be going, "Is that OS X 10.1, 10.2 or 10.3? I *think*
10.4 is Tiger so it's probably not 10.4."

Anyway, not to rain on the naming parade, but it is a problem to rely
on cute names a little too much since cute names don't contain
historical information like 10.4 or 5.10, and, they're going to be
coming fast an furious (every six months). Apple has stuck to a
constant numbering convention for two decades with a minor addition of
X in 2001. Microsoft keeps the same name for an OS for at least two
years.

In Ubuntu, although the naming convention of year.month is logical, it
is not a logical progression! 4.10, 5.4, 5.10, 6.4, 6.10, etc.

Eric.