Help us rebrand rawhide

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 15 August 2015 at 02:55, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-08-15 at 03:21 +0000, Chaoyi Zha wrote:
>> +1 on rolling
>
> -1 for rolling from me. Here's why:
>
> 1. Users will most likely misinterpret this codename to mean a
> _stable_rolling_release version of Fedora, which rawhide is not. We
> don't want people installing rawhide instead of our stable releases -
> that won't be a good thing, since even though rawhide is a lot more
> stable now, it doesn't go through the general QA process that applies
> to our stable releases.
>
> I think the idea here is to make rawhide *cool*, in a race car driver
> sort of way - it's fast, it likes to stay ahead, it has an adrenaline
> rush to it, it likes to win, and it takes some risks to do this
> (Sylvester Stallone in Driven, anyone?). So it's super cool to be a
> rawhide user, but it's also more risky - in a fun, daredevil way!
>

Have you actually talked with developers about what they want in an OS
they are working on. Most developers don't want cool.. they want
not-broken and boring. The coolest thing they want is a Mac laptop on
the outside but anyone notice that the interior hasn't changed much
since 2003? Just going from flat icons to rounded icons to flat icons
is about as much change as most developers really want. They might
drive a Lamborghini off their stock purchase but never out of 3rd gear
and the first time it breaks they take it back to the dealer complain
bitterly to all their friends about crappy cars and how never to use a
Lambo again.

The people who are the types to be attracted to dangerous distros are
already running rolling releases. They really don't expect a lot
because they have been sitting on Sid, Arch, Gentoo for years and know
that it is going to break and that they need to roll up their sleeves
to get it working again. Trying to put a new splash of paint on
rawhide isn't going to really do much for them because what they want
isn't in the name.. it is in the guts of the machine. That is going to
take a track record of cool stuff, unbreaking things as quickly as
possible and all the other things that rolling releases in Arch etc
have shown.

> 2. "Rolling" doesn't offer much theme wise. If we're redoing rawhide,
> why not pick something that gives the design team lots to work with -
> we could do lots of cool stuff with a new codename, t-shirts ("I'm
> badass, I run $rawhide!"). logos, images, case badges, stickers,
> wallpapers?
>

In that case, any name is going to be temporary because rocket, nuke,
sid, etc are going to run out of energy after a bit. So I would just
call it $bikeshed and give bikeshed a new definition every couple of
months.



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.