![[lang]](/images/eye.png)
Fedora 8 |
2007-11-08
|
Another 6 months, another Fedora release ! (I am happy Fedora is back on a 6 month schedule).
This is the first release of Fedora that I have on my computer without realizing I have it; I went checking this morning when the release would be, and apparently it was today. I checked my /etc/fedora-release, and I'm already on it, because apparently our Fedora hackers made the excellent decision that installing test3 would get you on a repo that would freeze for Fedora 8.
I think that is a great decision, it gives people more confidence to go and try the test releases because they know they will end up on a stable distro in the end.
Now mind you, I only got on the test3 release because my new T61 had some issues under F7 and I was hoping new X and kernels would fix most of them. My wireless (iwl4965 is still flaky, suspend to disk still does not work, and the video still has issues, but I digress)
Here is one question and one request though. First of all, who originally coined the name "Codec Buddy" without even writing a single line of code ? Seriously, the name is dumb, it can only remind me of the infamous paper clip or Microsoft Bob.
It's terrible that this name persists even though there is nothing in the whole thing using that name! Every time I read something with the word Codec Buddy, I decided against hacking on the thing, so it's one of the reasons it has arrived as late as it did.
So, the request, is simple: stop calling it Codec Buddy. I'm holding it hostage until you know better :)
Here's an interview about Codeina with our well-loved media nut Bastien and me. Ignore the wrong URL and the wrong titles and the multiple spelling mistakes for the word codeina.
Congrats to the Fedora team ! Now please fix my wireless and my suspend somehow :)
So true. Codec buddy just sounds really, really gay. It always reminds me of the term ‘but buddy’.
Comment by AC — 2007-11-08 @ 12:52
This dates back to the old days of Gnome for things like Bug Buddy, which I think was a pretty funny name. Funny in a “Lets not take ourselves too seriously”. Then we had a series of other projects, many that we no longer have like “Floppy Buddy” (which formatted floppies).
You could go Apple and call it “Codec Tool”, or you could go Microsoft and call it “Codec Administrator”, or you could go Web 2.0 and call it Codeine, or go back to late 80’s and call it “CodecMaster 2000” or even better “Turbo Codec Installer”, or go 90’s and call it “CodecShield”. pre-dot-boom naming is left as an exercise to the reader.
I kind of like the dont-take-yourself-too-seriously approach, but what do I know?
Neutrally,
Miguel
Comment by Miguel de Icaza — 2007-11-08 @ 17:50
or worse, Bonzi Buddy
Comment by JML — 2007-11-08 @ 18:45
Same goes for NetworkManager. What is up with these people that think mixed case is cool ?
It is already bad if a word can be spelled in 2 different ways, I do not want to be bothered with people casing some characters as well. I hated it when it was done for RPM packages (who cares about upstream’s preference of casing ?).
It messes with tab-completion, it makes queries unpredictable and you should not do it because you can. Damnit ! :)
Comment by Dag Wieers — 2007-11-08 @ 19:06
At least the name Codec Buddy tells you what it does. Maybe Format Finder or Plugin Helper would be less childish tho.
Dag, I agree package names should be all lower case, but you can easily set up case-insensitive tab completion. In zsh, you use
compctl -M ” ‘m:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}’
or
zstyle ‘:completion:*’ matcher-list ” ‘m:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}’
Comment by Mikel — 2007-11-08 @ 23:12
For bash, you put “set completion-ignore-case on” in ~/.inputrc.
Comment by Mikel — 2007-11-08 @ 23:20
I’ve never used Fedora before, but this release is very tempting. I’ll check it out when I get time. As for CodecBuddy – I’m not sure who you’re preaching to, but it sounds like the Fedora maintainers themselves need some convincing that it’s not actually called Codec Buddy.
From Fedora Project own release notes :
Codec Buddy
CodecBuddy, also known as codeina, guides users to better quality open formats when they attempt to play multimedia content that is in a proprietary or patent encumbered format. It also explains why we don’t support these formats in Fedora by default, and can help install appropriate plugins at the user’s request. It works as a wrapper around the Gstreamer multimedia framework, making it easy to expand in the future.
And a link to the WIKI:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CodecBuddy
Good luck with the campaign! :)
Comment by Scaine — 2007-11-13 @ 13:20