Re: Debian-Alpha port ideas...please read (long)
In article <[🔎] Pine.LNX.3.96.971029002524.4509A-100000@beezer.med.miami.edu> you wrote:
: ... I think if we want to get totally
: stable, we should freeze the development source tree right now and achieve
: 90% completion before trying to keep up with the x86'ers and their
: package-release pace.
Hmmm. You are, of course, right. I'm struggling a bit with the notion of
freezing our development source tree, though. As a cross-platform package
maintainer, a hard freeze would be a pain... a "soft freeze" is probably
manageable.
What I really notice is that we need to get a consistent set of libaries and
compiler tools in place...
: Honestly, the "hamm" directory on any platform right now is "iffy" at
: best.
I'd have agreed with you a couple of weeks ago. I'm fully up-to-date hamm
on my dual-P6 SMP box now, with kernel 2.1.57, and the machine is nice and
solid again.
: * ease of installation on ANY Alpha hardware
Good goal, hard to achieve unless we can identify folks who actually use
each of the machine types to help test and document things. The UDB's are
cute, but they aren't the whole picture.
: * great documentation that's easy to follow for installation procedures
: on all Alpha hardware
Ditto.
: * a unified and stable source tree for developers to work on porting
: (patches should be portable throughout platforms, fyi)
How about we constrain this to just stabilizing the libraries and development
tools? If we do that, we can choose whether to build new versions of app
packages or not as we wish with minimal impact.
: Developers, please monitor this list and that site for these reports daily
: (if possible) since our only hope for stability and problem resolution is
: via feedback.
I watch the list daily, but check the bug page much less frequently.
: even though *MY* personal system is stable
Ok, here's a thought. How about posting the output of "dpkg --list" here
once a week or something, with a few comments about anything that seems like
it isn't working well. I may be wrong, but I'm thinking this might help
communicate what we know is working... I've been on a jihad to run only
current libraries and rebuild rather than force dependencies... but I don't
actually live on my alpha (it's just a toy/learning tool/porting platform
for me), so I don't stress a lot of the system as much as others perhaps do.
: In short, we desperately need documentation right now rather than package
: availability.
We need the set of packages that are currently available on master in .deb
form to be consistent and functional, and dselectable. Once we achieve that
state, we need documentation. Once we have that, we can go back to trying to
increase the available package count and/or track the x86 clan...
: I also feel I should mention that I am not seeking any "power" position by
: promoting the above ideas.
No sweat.
Bdale
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