Re: lenny+1 and the future of the alpha port?
On Thu 21 Aug 2008, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
> Are there other developers still actively using alpha who are willing to do
> the work to maintain it? Or perhaps a more important question: does anyone
> foresee themselves still using alpha three years from now (1.5 years of
> lenny as stable, + 1 year of security support as oldstable)?
I still use an alpha as firewall / mailserver / DNS server,
taking the way of security through obscure hardware :-)
Any stack overflows or whatever will probably not have any example
exploit code available for alpha's, as hardly anyone knows any
significant amount of alpha machine code...
That said, I'm in agreement with you about how alpha is becoming
obsolete, which I find a bit sad somehow; it had great potential.
In my opinion it's safe to say that certainly three years from now,
alpha can be considered irrelevant, and continued support will indeed be
a waste of resources. If I still want my alpha firewall (assuming it
survives that long) I could build any packages myself, and I expect that
most people using alphas at that time would be in the same position.
Paul Slootman
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