(CCing to -amd64 so that any discussion that results from this mail will be visible to more than just me and you.) Hi ftpmaster, I'm writing to you as a Debian developer and user who is concerned about the long inaction with regard to getting the amd64 port of Debian added to sid. I understand from James's mail to -vote that part of the delay is due to annoyance with insults from certain vocal amd64 porters and a desire not to be seen as giving in to blackmail. I fully agree that personal attacks against you are entirely inappropriate and serve only to inflame the situation and interfere with progress. Still, please realize that this reaction is hurting lots of users, big and small, including many who had nothing to do with those insults. For example, in my day-to-day life, I am a university student/employee working with our CS department's technical staff. We will be installing Athlon 64 CPUs in our machines this summer, and we'd like to run them in 64 bit mode without switching away from our preferred OS (Debian of course). It's technically possible to do now with Alioth, but by going with an unofficial port we lose the autobuilding, bugtracking, and QA infrastructure that comes with being an official Debian port. Since we run a large production network which students, staff, and faculty depend on for coursework and research, we care about the quality of the base we start from in doing our own testing. I'm not asking for you to force the amd64 port into sarge like the GR on -vote, although I think its expected good performance in sid may well convince Anthony to let it into sarge anyway. All I'm asking is, please, remember that it is from users that Debian gets most of its bug reports, feature suggestions, word-of-mouth, and NM applicants. Please don't alienate them (us) and lose all of those benefits so vital to the continued success of Debian simply due to a spat with a few inconveniently placed foul-mouthed individuals. Thanks for reading this. If you want to have a (friendly) discussion about this in real-time, I'm usually around Freenode and OFTC during US Eastern Time afternoons/evenings with the IRC nickname Hydroxide. - Jimmy Kaplowitz jimmy@debian.org / jk@cs.brown.edu
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