governance/reference/release-naming.rst

Release Naming

OpenStack coordinated releases are numbered using a time-based scheme and this version number should be used in all official documentation, marketing materials, and release artifacts.

Additionally each OpenStack development cycle has a code-name that is proposed and chosen by the community. This name might be used in preference to the version number to refer to the release at the end of the cycle. The process of choosing the name should be an enjoyable activity for the community to mark the software development cycle, and the name itself should be fun to use.

Because the name will become associated with OpenStack, and a particular release, the process should consider potential issues of trademark.

Release Naming Process

The Technical Committee will designate an official to be responsible for executing the release naming process, which consists of the following steps:

1. The process to chose the name for a release begins once the location of the design summit of the release to be named is announced and no sooner than the opening of development of the previous release.
2. Anyone may propose a name that matches the Release Name Criteria. Proposed names should be added to a page on the OpenStack wiki.
3. The marketing community may identify any names of particular concern from a marketing standpoint and discuss such issues publicly on the Marketing mailing list. The marketing community may produce a list of problematic items (with citations to the mailing list discussion of the rationale) to the election official. This information will be communicated during the election, but the names will not be removed from the poll.
4. A Condorcet election is held among all OpenStack Foundation Individual Members to rank the names. The poll will include the names along with any links to mailing list discussions provided by the marketing community.
5. The Foundation will perform a trademark check on the winning name. If there is a trademark conflict, then the Foundation will proceed down the ranked list of Condorcet results until a name without a trademark conflict is found. This will be the selected name.

Release Name Criteria

The following rules are designed to provide some consistency in the pattern used to select release names, provide a fun challenge in finding names that meet the criteria, and prevent unwieldy names from being chosen.

1. Each release name must start with the letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet following the initial letter of the previous release, starting with the initial release of "Austin". After "Z", the next name should start with "A" again.
2. The name must be composed only of the 26 characters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Names which can be transliterated into this character set are also acceptable.
3. The name must refer to the physical or human geography of the region encompassing the location of the OpenStack design summit for the corresponding release.
4. The name must be a single word with a maximum of 10 characters. Words that describe the feature should not be included, so "Foo City" or "Foo Peak" would both be eligible as "Foo".

Names which do not meet these criteria but otherwise sound really cool should be added to a separate section of the wiki page and the TC may make an exception for one or more of them to be considered in the Condorcet poll. The naming official is responsible for presenting the list of exceptional names for consideration to the TC before the poll opens.