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Why did Ubuntu skip letters in the 1st four release names for Ubuntu?

The story of the 1st release being named "Warty Warthog", because it lacked polish, is well know, but why didn't they continue alphabetically from there?

Here are the 1st four releases:

  1. "W"... Ubuntu 4.10 - Warty Warthog
  2. "H"... Ubuntu 5.04 - Hoary Hedgehog
  3. "B"... Ubuntu 5.10 - Breezy Badger
  4. "D"... Ubuntu 6.06 LTS - Dapper Drake

They skipped to "H" for the 2nd Ubuntu release, instead of continuing with the next letter, "X".

Then skipped to "B" for the 3rd Ubuntu release, instead of continuing with the next letter, "I", or even starting at the beginning with "A".

They skipped "C" entirely for the 4th Ubuntu release and jumped to the letter "D".

After Dapper Drake, every release has been consistently named with the next letter of the alphabet.

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After the first four it made sense to go in order.

For all of our sanity we are going to try to keep these names alphabetical after Breezy. We might skip letters, and we'll have to wrap eventually. But the naming convention is here for a while longer, at least. The possibilities are endless. Gregarious Gnu? Antsy Aardvark? Phlegmatic Pheasant? You send 'em, we'll consider 'em. - Mark Shuttleworth

So if you look at things like the infrastructure, Launchpad, etc. it's easy to see what "order" things were released in when they're in alphabetical order. If we skipped around it'd be impossible to tell what came before and after what.

At the time it also became easier to reference the future animal as a letter without having to know exactly what it was called, so we could do things like schedule the developer summit under "uds-m" (for example).

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  • Thanks for the quote from Mark Shuttleworth. Do you happen to know the original date of that statement? (It must have been some time in 2006, I would guess). Aso, the point about being able to referencing future unnamed releases makes a lot of sense.
    – Enterprise
    Oct 21, 2014 at 18:52

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