Fedora naming proposal based on Periodic Table of Elements

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 5:57 PM, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 11:44 -0500, inode0 wrote:
>> > The folks who came up with the naming scheme themselves have said enough
>> > is enough.
>>
>> I think there is a pretty big disconnect between what people think is
>> the reaction and what people at events representing Fedora see as the
>> reaction. I know I have not seen anything at all negative personally
>> at events with non-Fedora people. I only see negativity about the name
>> internally.
>
> Ambassadors have reported frustration trying to introduce Fedora to new
> users because they have no idea what the release names mean and feel
> it's an inside joke they aren't welcome to, and struggle to explain them
> because of the language barrier. I remember talking to Tatica about this
> at LGM when the 'spherical cow' codename was announced.

I don't believe moving to a set format such as the periodic table is
going to improve that at all and if they're confused about the release
names are they any less confused about say the Ubuntu naming? I'm not
sure some of the word used in their releases are even translatable
into a lot of languages.

> So maybe non-Fedora people aren't complaining because they have no idea
> what's going on or were turned off and went to another distro.

I also are very unsure about people going to another distribution due
to the name. I don't believe there's any evidence of this what so
ever. Most people I know that don't like the release naming ignore it
and just use the release number.

Just before the release of Fedora 17 there was a board ticket opened
by someone in the Fedora Hindu community about the use of beef in the
naming due to the cow being sacred. They never bothered to bring it up
long before that even though it had been public for months and what's
more the number of people that vote for a release name isn't that high
and the difference in voting between first and second wasn't a huge
number and if it was such a big problem for the user base it wouldn't
have taken much effort to gather together a group of people and vote
against it. From memory the person that opened the ticket didn't even
care enough to answer a number of questions asked of them.

I personally like the current process, but if there is enough
consensus for it to be changed whether it be to another naming scheme
or no scheme at all I'm not going to go else where but nobody has
actually stepped up to run the process and work work with the board to
actually get things moving forward which is why we're back in having
this conversation again and nothing has happened. It seems people care
enough to talk about it on mailing lists but not enough to change the
process.

Peter