Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org> writes: > Using version numbers would be more lacking social skills. People > prefer nicknames, not versions.
Version numbers are more useful the less familiar you are with the OS because they have a well-defined order. I've never needed them for Debian, but, for example, I find the Mac OS X naming system rather frustrating. I rarely deal with Mac OS X, so when those who do start talking about it, I'm usually left slightly baffled because I can't figure out the ordering of names like "Lion," "Snow Leopard," or "Mountain Lion." This is particularly frustrating during in-person conversations (on-line, I can just look it up). (If people's imagination are failing them about why this would matter in conversation, consider statements like "I think that feature was introduced in lenny" or "that should be fixed in wheezy" or "that system is still running etch," and then consider the same statements with the codenames replaced by version numbers and notice how much easier it is to understand the context of that statement if you happen to know your local system is running Debian 6 when you don't know any of the release names.) Thankfully, Debian provides a perfectly reasonable version numbering system (as, for that matter, does Apple), so all one has to do is remember to use it with the uninitiated. For example, our internal metrics on adoption and migration to new OS releases that are sent to management refer to "Debian 5" and "Debian 6" (and soon "Debian 7") rather than lenny, squeeze, or wheezy. It's worth noting that I never have the problem with Ubuntu that I have with Mac OS X, despite having very little interaction with Ubuntu, since I can always recover the ordering from the first character of the nickname. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87txr92179....@windlord.stanford.edu
