Fedora Release Name process ended | Hacker News Reader

Fedora Release Name process ended

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12 pointsAkhilan16 comments

Good. The last handful of release names were moronic, and the number of person-hours wasted debating the merits of the various names in IRC and on mailing lists was staggering.

I think it wasn't always bad. It gave personality to projects. But I agree with you that it's time to move on.

Fedora naming convention was always a bit strange.

we went from Sulfur, Cambridge, Leonidas and Constantine (examples)

to Beefy Miracle, Spherical Cow... and... Heisenbug..

the previous names seem stronger to me for some reason.

I think they choose silly names on purpose, to stop people from referring to the code names when talking about the finished product.

No stranger than a very popular distro that uses names from Toy Story for its releases.

FWIW, there is at least a "method to the madness" behind the naming of Debian releases. Fedora and Ubuntu, for example, seem to come up with names at random.

For Ubuntu, each release uses the next letter of the alphabet. And the names are chosen by Mark Shuttleworth, who writes up an explanation of each one.

The adjectives used also indicate the mission of that particular release--the LTS releases' names have attempted to indicate their relative stability: Dapper, Hardy, Lucid, Precise, and Trusty. Whereas the intermediate releases which debut new ideas and tools have names that indicate their freer status: Edgy, Maverick, Raring, Jaunty, Feisty.

Silly it may be. Pointless? Definitely. But random it is not.

I had no idea there was actually "logic" to the naming. Thanks.

Still stupid names, but at least with a goal in mind.

I actually didn't realise that for quite a long time, perhaps due to the obscurity of some of them. Seems 1.0-3.1 were more obvious though.

The earlier Fedora names were similar to the old RHL names: a single word with no (apparent) obvious meaning; it was like they were drawn from a hat. IIRC, we had Colgate, Vanderbilt, Biltmore, Hurricane, Apollo (the last best release, IMO), Cartman, Zoot, Guinness, Enigma, and several others I can't recall.

The more recent Fedora names seemed to be a spin off of Ubuntu's naming (which, personally, as a non-Ubuntu user, I think is stupid).

Can someone please get me inline with why we have Fedora in comparison to the CentOS community? It seems as if CentOS was more inline with the Redhat commercial enterprise edition. I've been a Mac user for a while, so my Unix has be branded on Darwin vs. others - so this seems like a legit place to get the difference nailed down. Thanks!

CentOS is a clone of RHEL - there is work involved in running the build systems, mirrors, de-branding and such. It is intended for those who want to use RHEL - personally, non-profit, etc., who just cannot justify the support licensing of RHEL.

Fedora, on the other hand, is Red Hat’s “next generation”. Software packages have a change to mature, be soundly tested and stabilify there before being introduced to RHEL, to give those “enterprise” users a fair degree of security on system stability, at the expense of a slow lead time (for example, one of my employers still recommends RHEL 5.x, which is “current”, though 6.x is out. RHEL 5.x uses Kernel 2.6).

Perhaps Ubuntu will follow suit. They have came up with some really stupid names over the years and, as a non-Ubuntu user, it's impossible to keep track of what actual version "Retarded Rhino" corresponds to.

I suspect that they'll keep going until Zippy Zebra, which is just a few years away. At that point they'll have to make a decision on how to continue; discontinuing the silly code names will be on their list of options.

At least the Ubuntu where alphabetical so you knew the the release starting with R was released after the release starting with Q. Apple, Fedora and Debian releases on the other hand are completely random and every time I see something like "Mountain Lion or later" I have to Google release names to find out what it actually means and if I can run it or not.

This is coming after Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle and Fedora 18 Spherical Cow.

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