Fedora naming proposal based on Periodic Table of Elements

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-10-11 at 18:14 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> 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.
>
> He followed up with you guys a number of times. I watched it on the
> list.
>
> I will say I was a supporter of Beefy Miracle, but there were times went
> it went much too far. For example, I can't participate in Fedora events
> when hot dogs are being handed out, because I can't eat them - I've
> stood manning a Fedora booth with the strong smell of hot dogs cooking
> right in front of me. (Seriously unpleasant for a vegetarian.)

And I completely agree with you here. I'm not a vegetarian, in fact
far from it as I grew up on a farm, but I would argue that some of the
"beefy miracles" aren't beef or appetising to me as a meat eater what
so ever. It's a little unfortunate but while I enjoyed the jokes about
it early on I never thought it was suitable release name. We made our
bed and all that....

> It's not offensive IMHO, but it is childish and annoying. Look at the
> Fedora 19 proposals so far. The vast majority are juvenile. Prime Rib?
> Elastic Horses? Really???

Yes, I agree with that, it's unfortunate with Beefy Miracle we did
sort of pain ourselves into a corner but it doesn't mean the process
is bad and a good F-19 could move us out of this.

>> 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.
>
> I created and came up with the majority of the suggestions on the
> theming process wiki page:
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Suggestions_for_Fedora_Codename_Theme
>
> I have been waiting for months for the board to set up an election for
> this as asked for. We got one election which was poorly put together and
> led to no solid conclusions since there were only two options, not the
> three that had been asked for: "Keep a codename" vs "Don't keep a
> codename" instead of "Keep the process as-is", "Get a better one", "No
> codenames."

My memories of this may be a little rough around the edges, the last 6
months have been pretty tough for a number of reasons for me. But from
memory I remember the following bits:

The reason for the binary voting was to keep it simple to try to
ascertain a specific requirement "Do we want a release name" as if it
came back to an astounding NO there's not much point wasting time
deciding on the process to change it.

There was then suppose to be a committee from the community to decide
what to do about it and come up with a community proposal to put to
the board/community for voting. Someone from the board took the action
to move this forward. In fact I believe the role of the board member
(and someone from the board might be able to confirm these details)
was to actually engage someone in the community who wanted to drive
the change to pick it up and run with it. This is where my memory is
slim but I seem to remember (but I'm very likely wrong here) that
there wasn't a major interest in someone picking it up and running
with it.

Then when it came up again was just before or as we hit the deadline
for naming for F-19 and with the jboss name change legal indicated
that they were over worked so for a number of reasons it was pushed
back.

> We're not simply whining about it, a bunch of us have been putting
> together these suggestions and looking to the board for guidance for
> quite some time now.

I don't believe I ever said anyone was whining but I've only seen a
small minority of people actually care about it. In the last couple of
releases it's amazed me how many people in the general non linux
populous have spoken to me about Fedora.

Peter