[PLUG-TALK] Software Release Nomenclature

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Fri Mar 27 00:12:26 UTC 2015


>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> writes:

Paul> On Thu, 26 Mar 2015, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 09:36:26AM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
>>> I am curious why some software (Debian, Ubuntu, and R come
>>> immediately to mind) have names as well as numbers for each
>>> release. For example, the current R release, 3.1.3, is named Smooth
>>> Sidewalk' and the forthcoming 3.2.0 is named 'Full of Ingredients.'
>> 
>> Because people relate better to names.

Paul> And they're fun to devise; concocting hostname schemes is one of
Paul> the longest-tenured perks of being a sysadmin.

I have to say that for version naming, an ordinal scale is desirable.
If you want to do that with letters, fine.  Hostnames are different, as
there there isn't much ordering involved.  They are different, in that
they have different services.

I kind of detest the debian release naming, because I can never remember
which toy story character came before another, or why an ordering of the
characters would make sense.  Ubuntu kind of gets it right with their
alphabetic sequence (though they are getting close to running out of
letters).  Their date-based numbering is awesomely immediately
understandable .  They have other problems, like users interface design,
but their version numbering > debian's version names.


-- 
Russell Senior, President
russell at personaltelco.net



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