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Comment by jessor | Hacker News Reader

Nice. I hope it gets the google love it deserves. Googling for ubuntu-specific problems can become quite painful since forum threads are often full of outdated or useless statements.

Q&A Sites seem to be the answer of the problems that forums and wikis suffer from.

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Yeah, nothings more infuriating than trying to find an answer and you get a blog post about Feisty Fawn.

Your comment excited me because I thought questions would be tagged by Ubuntu release, but that does not seem to be the case.

edit: Looks like the release tag is available but optional which saddens me.

It should be optional, because there will be questions the span a few releases, and the number of tags on a question is limited to 5.

Or they should make the version tags a separate set of tags - they are really different information than the content of the rest of the tags.

Edit: Re-thinking this - maybe version should be mandatory, but again not count against the tag limit, with the ability to add other versions to the question if applicable to future releases.

Or just provide a 'non-version specific' tag in addition to the version ones.

It would be great if they gave points for tagging answers with the pertinent releases.

Feisty Fawn is how old? I can never remember the names of the releases. Why can't they just stick to the numbering scheme?

Naming is in sequence alphabetically and there is a release every 6 months. Maverick Meerkat was released recently. A B C D E F G H I J K L M... so that means... (13-6 releases) * (6 months/1 release) * (1 year/12 months) = 3.5 years

Except that there was no A, B, or C release in the current lineup, because it started with Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, Breezy Badger, and then they decided on the sequentially named releases starting with Dapper Drake (6.06).

Feisty Fawn was 7.04.

Good point. I put that in more to represent releases between F and M but I see why that was confusing.

The official release name is Ubuntu Y.MM (10.10 just came out, replacing 10.4 released in April). The... err... fanciful names are development codenames.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DevelopmentCodeNames

This kind of thing is always frustrating but personally I nearly always use the time constraint on my Google searches. This usually fixes the problem.

Yeah, I always end up searching "my random problem karmic".

Not only that, but they archive their forums after a while.

So even if the info was partially useful you can't reply with updated information, since they've put in the artificial restriction that you can't reply to threads from say 2008.

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