Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Proposed New Branding for Rawhide: Untested

At flock, mattdm, I and others were discussing the need to replace the message about Rawhide that it kills babies, eats kittens, etc.

I would like to suggest a new name for Rawhide, or at least a new message:

Untested



But why is "Untested" a good name?
  1. It is simple and easy to explain to a non-technical person. (manager)
  2. It highlights the work off the Fedora QA team, whose existence most new users are unaware of (until recently.)
  3. Fedora QA is working on automated testing. Once more automated testing is in place, "Untested" can be changed to something like "Minimally Tested" to reflect this work. Yet the "Rawhide" codename can remain.
  4. It can motivate (or trigger discussions on) writing automated tests.
  5. People love codenames. And the "Rawhide" codename can be kept, without the churn of picking a new codename every 6 months.
Examples:
  1. My dad likes technology, but is not a "power user." If I tell him that "version X of software Y is untested", he won't bother to use it until "they've fixed all the bugs."
  2. My Debian friends are always calling Fedora "Red Hat testing" or "Red Hat unstable". This branding makes it easier to say "Fedora releases and their updates are tested, they have an updates-testing repo, and there is an untested version."

2 comments:

  1. Untested packages are in the testing repos. Rawhide means more than just untested: its software and packages are in development. So unstable might be a more fitting name.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good point. I forgot about pre-release versions.

      Delete