In my 7+ years as an Ubuntu developer, I have yet to see a news article or forum post about a release that didn't somewhere spawn a discussion about adjective animal names.

Frankly, I think it generates considerable free buzz. Everyone's always talking about shuttleworthian adjectives and obscure animals.

My one point of contention, and I've brought this up with Mark personally, is that he needs to announce the name of the next release sooner. Or at least the adjective code name, as it's relevant for things like scripts and other tools, and once we start to freeze things we need to retarget stuff to the next (+1) release.

It's quite silly for any of that work to delay for a reason as lame as wanting to unveil the adjective in a future quirky blog post. Would you believe we actually had to build an abstraction layer in launchpad for release names so we can have things like the "R release" rather than just using the adjective directly?

12.10 is the official name for the actually released OS. The animal name is the code word for the thing that will become 12.10 when it's done. Things get a little confused sometimes in e.g. apt repositories but the official stuff is all quite clear on the distinction.

They're almost at the end of the alphabet. What are they going to do next? They won't stop until "Zebra" though.

Personally I'm looking forward to a Randy Rhinoceros in six months.

> barely pronounceable

Pronounceable correctly, maybe. ("Quantal" is easy, but the first time I read it I pronounced "quetzal" like "pretzel" with a 'qw' instead of 'pr' and I will likely continue to do so even though it's technically wrong.)