Ask HN: Who decided codenames were a good idea?

6 points by thanzex 1 year ago | 5 comments

Forgive my possibly young take and mix between a rant and a question on this topic, but who in their right mind decided that using codenames to identify a particular software version was a good idea? For the longest time this has always completely infuriated me, at first, when I usually helped my family members with their apple devices, I had to work with "It worked with High Sierra" or "the software page says it needs Big Sur", which mean absolutely nothing to anyone not actively using these codenames.

Then I happened to become interested in software and become a SWE which forced me to again butt my head against this as the whole Linux world decided to go down this path. Every distribution, some worse than others, decided to choose completely different ways of doing things, Mint uses female names, Debian uses Toy story characters and who knows what Ubuntu is doing. Some are alphabetically ordered, some not, again creating unnecessary friction in understanding which one is older. Some that are in alphabetical order already reached V, what happens then?

You want to download Debian/Ubuntu cloud images? The web directory is indexed by the codename, same for bugs on launchpad. Are you checking a GitHub repo to build a package locally? Be prepared to know that it no longer supports Bookworm. And please, remember the codename of all the VPSs and Linux boxes you have around the house or you'll have to check every time a package doesn't work right.

This then forces me and everyone else to go the extra step of looking up which codename corresponds to which version, which is a complete waste of time. And even if you happen to know them, I would bet few people actually remember the mapping between codename and version after a few releases.

How did you come to terms with this?

TLDR: WTF?

Bender 1 year ago |

I'm with you and I like the way Alpine Linux does it.

Alpine Linux 3.19

Alpine Linux 3.20

Alpine Linux 3.21

Those are recent major releases. Minor releases will look like 3.21.1, 3.21.2. [1] It's even used in their news and feature enhancements, updates. People can control their major releases with one file. Going from 3.20 to 3.21 was straight forward and I knew my machines would go from the 6.6 LTS kernel to the 6.12 LTS kernel. Edge is for the latest testing bleeding edge packages. I use Alpine on all my physical and virtual machines in the cloud, home router/firewall, NAS, etc... Everything is consistent, simple and clean. Boring, the way I like it.

    cat /etc/apk/repositories 
    #/media/sdb/apks
    http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.21/main
    http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.21/community
    #http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main
    #http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community
    #http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

    bender [~]# apk update && apk upgrade --available

[1] - https://alpinelinux.org/

bediger4000 1 year ago |

I mostly agree with you. My only note is that "Catalina" is easier to remember than "version 10.15". I believe this is all part of the general trend towards soft and sloppy language. Like "launch PowerPoint". "Launch". There's a zillion examples of imprecise language used to describe computer-related things. "Device" is a good one. "Substance abuse" falls in that category. Sawdust is a substance, can I abuse it?

As an explanation, not an excuse, I think this phenomenon exists because use of computers arrived so rapidly that society couldn't educate itself fast enough. We got skeuomorphisms like deleting files via dragging to an image of a wastebasket, or the old 1.44 inch floppy case as a save button, or calling directories "folders". Technology changed so rapidly that folklore had to take the place of any thought out or well-considered set of practices and vocabulary.

To answer your question, I haven't come to terms with it. I feel irritation when someone writes or talks about something like "task manager" or "tool" or "navigate to the login page".

bell-cot 1 year ago |

If your company is big enough to attract journalists, or gossip could have unhappy consequences, then codenames are obviously useful internally. Dev's in a bar talking about problems with "Armstrong" are leaking less info than if they were talking about problems with "Pride'N'Joy v4.2".

But of course, it ain't just the dev's who learn and use the codenames. Later in the cycle, Marketing and Sales do too. And since their job is to convince the wider world that v4.2 is the greatest thing ever seen - well, to 99.9% of the world, "Armstrong" sounds far cooler than "v4.2". So obviously they'll want to talk it up that way...

JohnFen 1 year ago |

I'm with you. This is one of my pet peeves, and I can't wait for it to go out of fashion.

pelagic_sky 1 year ago |

Marketing?