Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
Package: www.debian.org Severity: important www.debian.org/ports says about ia64: "This is a port to Intel's 64-bit architecture." Without further any warning/information about that other 64bit architecture intel, amd etc are producing: amd64. A *lot* of people try to use ia64 installation media to install Debian on their Opteron's etc, and then mail (for example) debian-cd that the cd is broken and doesn't boot.
heh, if people can't figure that out, just how far do you expect them to get with Debian once they *do* get it installed? Look, I'm all for user-friendliness and idiot-proofing as much as the next guy but this is really pushing it.
The paragraph in question could and IMHO should be more elaborate, like, saying it's Intel *alpha* 64, aka Itanium, and mention it's a high-end processor that's not available in consumer's computer shops at all, and also mention there exists another 64-bit processer made by Intel and others, that is *not* ia64, but rather 'amd64'.
IMHO there are two sane options:- refer to architectures by their historical names, i.e. the first popular names for architectures: IA-32 is x86, amd64 is x86-64 (note that this is what AMD called it for the first few years of its life) and Itanium/IPF/whatver is IA-64.
- refer to architectures by whatever companies currently call them; here you run into problems because the PR droids in these places are battling it out, so the names change once in a while and different companies give the same thing different names: Intel *today* call x86 IA-32 but AMD call it x86, however Intel call x86-64 EM64T (stupid, IMO) while AMD call it AMD64 (equally stupid, with an added element of desperation).
(filed at important due to the huge amount of confusion this and maybe some other debian.org pages cause in this regard).
If this is really causing such a huge amount of confusion, may I suggest the following: a great big "NO CLUE? YOU WANT THIS ONE" icon taking people to the x86 installer, and a little "l337 hax0r/I actually know what that is under my desk" icon taking people to all the others.
my $0.02, Duraid