Re: current state of sid (unstable)
On 04/08/10 15:04, Matt Turner wrote:
On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Michael Cree<mcree@orcon.net.nz> wrote:
Comments welcome. I've received one strong recommendation to give
Gentoo a try,
Matt, no doubt :-/ He's a great evangelist for Gentoo.
Turn that :-/ upside.. well, not down. :-\ is pretty much the same.
Maybe I should've written ";-/" The wink is important.
I don't want to make this a distro war, but your waste of time almost
definitely could have been avoided by asking a question or two of the
six or seven Gentoo/Alpha users on the #alpha IRC channel, to which
you're already connected.
I didn't know what IRC was, let alone how to connect to it, at the time
of trying to install Gentoo so it wasn't something I could turn to.
Anyway that misses the point. One (whether an expert or beginning user)
should be able to install a working version of a distribution without
having to scream to the distribution developers for help.
When I first turned to Debian it made a good impression on me. The
biggest difficulty I had was trying to get the console on the serial
port when I first booted the machine. Once I had solved that I shortly
thereafter had Debian Linux installed and working. That was my first
experience with both AlphaLinux and with Debian. Nice.
But with Gentoo I had a massive fight to get something barely working
and that is when I was already quite experienced with AlphaLinux. Not a
good impression and first impressions _really_ matter.
It's less about $x
feature than it is that Gentoo actively supports Alpha/Linux. We
actively find, report, and fix bugs in the Kernel, gcc, glibc, and
X.Org.
And the work you and other Gentoo developers have been doing is great
and a big part of why the upstream support for Alpha is in a notably
better position now than the recent past. Your efforts are greatly
appreciated and all of us Alpha users benefit.
But the name of the distribution isn't important. That one has active
developers working on it while another does not, however, is
important.
But, please don't ignore the efforts of others. I, who am a Debian
user, have made Alpha specific bug fixes to both the kernel and Xorg
over the last year (as you well know), and I see the names of Debian
developers against recent Alpha specific commits to glibc-ports and on
recent Alpha specific bug reports to the Linux kernel list.
Debian Alpha is unfortunately not in a well state, hence its removal as
a release candidate for Squeeze, nevertheless it is wrong to assume that
it is dead and buried and that we all should jump ship.
Cheers
Michael
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