worrying about sparc/alpha boot floppies
Adam Di Carlo writes:
>
> I'm a little worried that we don't have up-to-date boot-floppies for
> Alpha and Sparc. Is there a plan to release these platforms a little
> later than the x86 (and m68k?) release date?
This only my personal opinion, but I feel for the Alpha, releasing it
one or two weeks after x86 would make sense. Changes in the
source packages can sometimes introduce problems on the Alpha, so
there is no way we can be exactly in sync (other than setting x86 on
hold once it is finished).
> Are there parties actively working on this for release? I don't see a
> lot of activity. I know Loic Prylli is working on the Alpha stuff but
> haven't seen any patches or builds for a while.
Actually the main reason a new boot-floppies for Alpha has not been
done is technical, the register_frame_info problems that occured on
x86 with egcs have appeared with a slighlty different timing (because
the problematic code involved in the source is not the same for x86
and alpha, and was not intiduced at the same time in the upstream
code), and in a different way (as egcs is our main compiler, and
reverting to gcc is not an option). The good thing is that the
problem is basically solved. But as this problem had an impact about
every exectuable generated, I did not try generate installation disks
with "non-standard" executables.
> I wouldn't mind having a cushion time after i386/m68k release to try to
> get the documentation up to snuff for sparc/alpha. I've currently had
> no time (and no patches submitted to me) to even put in the existing
> platform documentation scattered around.
>
> Thoughts?
Yes, Alpha documentation is still poor, that is the other reason
releasing it only one week or two after the other would make sense.
Regards,
Loic
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