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<snip>
Further, from a purely technical perspective, I think I've been
swayed by
arguments around the generation of the hostname:
* I'm fine with the lowercase "fedora-" prefix. It makes sense since
hostnames
are generally normalized to lower-case in common usage.
* I like Zbigniew and Lennart's thoughts on how to generate the "random"
suffix.
the implementation I'd likely use is to take the first eight characters of an
md5 (or SHA) hash of /etc/machine-id and use those. That should make it both
repeatable and unique.
For Anaconda folks: would it be possible to have the currently-selected
hostname
be visible next to the "Networking" spoke on the main hub page? You show the
selected environment group beside the "Software Selection" spoke and the
connected network device, so it might be useful to let people know what the
hostname is as well. (This would also be handy if it turns out that DHCP is
trying to assign a hostname; the user may not want or expect that)
As mentioned in the fedora-desktop thread about branding, I don't like seeing
this sort of randomly generated and nonsensical (and I mean that in that a string
of hex characters obviously don't *mean* something) shouldn't be user-visible.
Right now, you'd see the hostname on the machine itself in the Sharing and
Details panels in GNOME, in bash's prompt, and in quite a few remotely accessible
services (the Bluetooth name, shared media, ssh, etc.).
There's nothing stopping us from having a hidden/secondary hostname though,
and a randomly generated one would fit perfectly for this sort of use case.