Proposal: Fedora 21+ image naming scheme

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2014-09-03 at 09:13 -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> On Wed, 03 Sep 2014 09:40:12 -0400
> Andre Robatino <robatino at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 
> > This is a reply to
> > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/rel-eng/2014-July/018178.html
> > . (Sorry, but there appears to be no Gmane interface to this mailing
> > list, and I just subscribed to the list, so I don't have the original
> > email.)
> > 
> > >
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Adamwill/Draft_fedora_image_naming_policy
> > 
> > Is there a reason the order of the name components couldn't be more
> > similar to the download directory structure? For example, old pungi
> > images were named like Fedora-20-i386-DVD.iso, corresponding to
> > $VERSION/$ARCH (and $IMAGETYPE comes last since both of these, DVD and
> > netinst, are in the same dir). So, in
> > https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/21-Alpha-TC5/Workstation/i386/iso/
> > , instead of Fedora-Workstation-netinst-i386-21-Alpha-TC5.iso, what
> > about Fedora-21-Alpha-TC5-Workstation-i386-netinst.iso? This is
> > basically the same as the old naming in the case of install images
> > (except for the new $PRODUCT field).
> 
> the naming was decided by Adam with minimal input from me. doing what
> you are proposing is quite a bit of extra work. we actually feed in
> Fedora-Workstation as a single option on the CLI. I really do not see
> what it gains us.  Can you please try to better explain why you feel we
> should change it now?

Well, I didn't decide it, I *proposed* it. The page does have "draft" in
the title, and thread has "proposal" in the subject :) I was kinda
expecting discussion, refinement, pushback etc etc, but in fact no-one
seemed to mind and you just went ahead and used it, so hey.

I think my thinking was that, well, 'Fedora Workstation' is supposed to
be the product, so it seems odd to split up the two elements of the
product name in the image name. But you're correct that it does not
reflect the hierarchy used on the mirrors, where 'release' beats
'product'. If you're trying to parse from the image name to the TC/RC
directory tree or vice versa this is obviously sub-optimal, yes. I don't
know what the actual release tree is supposed to look like yet,
entirely.

I'm not sure I agree this causes 'user confusion' - could you elaborate
on that? Are you thinking of a user manually browsing the tree, looking
for something to download? We can probably optimize that case indeed,
but I'd want to take a look at the whole thing, not just 'change the
image name to reflect the directory structure' (since the directory
structure is extremely arbitrary at this point) but consider both
together, and I'd also want to look at *all* images. The point of the
new naming scheme is to account for the fact we now have, like, 20+
images. We have lives, netinsts, "DVD"s and various types of disk image
for three products and several 'not-products', it's something of a mess,
so you might want to take the whole list of images from one of the TCs,
run it through your proposed naming scheme, and see if they all make
sense - that's what I did.

I agree that you want significance to run left to right in names, but
I'm not sure it's correct that version/release is more significant than
Product (as in your initial proposal). I don't immediately see any
issues with your second, but I'd have to look at the full list of images
again to make sure. I'm not sure it's necessarily worth more churn for
Dennis if we don't have a more compelling reason than 'potential user
confusion'(?), but on the other hand, this is probably the time to 'get
it right' while it's still new - the longer we use any one scheme the
more inertia it has behind it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net