Re: squeeze and the future of the alpha port, redux
Hello world!
I volunteer for some work in the project.
If commitment is of some hours a week, I think I could manage it.
I had a look at the open bugs in the last weeks and I can tell that
many are related to ancient software.
All of the kernel related bugs are of ancient releases (2.6.14, 2.6.22)
and has been fixed with later releases.
Others are unreproducible, like the one about "lightspeed" package.
Others are not only related to alpha.
For example, "xmovie does not build on alpha".
xmovie does not build anywhere, neither alpha, nor i386.
BTW, do we need xmovie?
vlc, totem and mplayer are more advanced players.
I will go deeper in testing with this bugs in the next days, and file
bugreports about what I discover.
About the lack of Java support, it is true that Java runs in
interpreted mode, but still, there is an openjdk-6 package which is in
working state.
It is able to work out with simple applications, and also for running
netbeans 6.5.
And it is the first time since years, that we have a complete, working
and free java environment on Alpha Linux.
Overall performance of the interpreted virtual machine is really good
for small applications.
Netbeans performance is good (however not fast) at least on DS20.
Just a last consideration... it is well known that Alpha platform has
to come to an end, sooner or later, but I think the time is not now.
With some effort, we could keep Debian support for Alpha up to the
Squeeze release.
Then we could start an unofficial port continuing the work, but for a
smaller number of packages and not the whole 22000 packages which are
in the offical repositories right now.
Best regards
Gianluca Bonetti
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