On 08/11/2012 12:41 PM, Eddie G. O'Connor Jr. wrote:
As far as I can see, there's no imminent harm to giving a new
release of
an OS a name, if anything it gives it an identity, something to
associate it with, such as when two developers are talking and one says
have you seen the splash screens for "Verne"?....with the two of them
BOTH knowing what Fedora 16's "name" is. If someone doesn't think an
OS
release shouldn't' be named they can just ignore the name and go ahead
and call it by whatever makes them happy! Remember Linux is all about
"Freedom Of Choice"...whatever you choose to do, (within bounds of
course!) is fine!
I have no problems, personally, in naming releases. I'm sure it's much
easier for the devs to refer to them by name, especially in
conversation. And, for some distros, such as Ubuntu, the userbase tends
to use the names, not release number, making the names even more
important. My objection to the name for F17 is that it sounds immature,
rather as though it had been picked by a thirteen-year-old boy suffering
from testosterone overload for the first time. Yes, I understand that
it was picked to honor the memory of a well-liked Fedora developer, but
that's what it looks like to me.
Names can be a good thing, but an ill-chosen one can be a PR nightmare.
I think that the only reason we've not had trouble over Beefy Miracle
is the fact that most people who know anything about Fedora tend to
ignore the names and those who don't mostly know why it got the name.
This time, we got lucky and didn't end up with a metric butload of bad
publicity. In the future, I think that some of the more mature devs
might want to take a little time to make sure that we use a little
common sense and avoid such names.
YMMV, and if it does, please remember that the above is only my opinion
and you're free to ignore it if you want.