Help us rebrand rawhide

[Matthew Miller]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 01:21:40PM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> OK, I have to respond to this one.  Rawhide was once a great distribution
> for staying at the leading edge of things; I was an enthusiastic user.
> But then developers stopped caring whether it broke, and, when I reported
> bugs, I was told that I shouldn't be running Rawhide at all.  After a bit
> of that, I moved on.  So did lots of others, I think.
> So now we're going to fix it and the first thing to do is to ... change
> the name?

Hi Jonathan. In short, no. :) This is the marketing list, and that's
the first thing around this for the marketing team to do. But this
isn't just a rebranding, and any name change would come _after_ actual
technical changes. The plan involves taking some lessons from our
friends over at openSUSE, and implementing gating, so that packages are
put in side-tags until they pass basic tests (initially, very basic
tests like dependency closure, and then "did this break booting", and
up from there").

The message of a name change is as much for those developers who told
you you shouldn't be running Rawhide at all as it is for users -- this
is something unlike what Rawhide has ever been, even in the days when
it was in better shape overall.

> I'd say forget about the name; it's one with some good history and name
> recognition.  Instead, rehabilitate it.  Show the world that developers
> *do* care about whether Rawhide actually works and that they actually
> want to see bug reports.  Then people might actually start coming back.

All of the above said, I'm cautiously open to this possibility, if if
there's agreement that we can make it work.


> P.S. I wrote an article (https://lwn.net/Articles/506831/) about why I
> left Rawhide.  

I remember. And I'm pretty sure you remember that I'm quoted. :)


>    If the project is now actively trying to make Rawhide
> usable, I might be interested in doing something about the real steps
> that have been taken to make that happen...

More details to come. Although possibly after a quite a large amount of
post-Flock sleep. :)


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader