Re: current status of alpha in squeeze

[Bob Tracy <rct@gherkin.frus.com>]

(Recipient list is getting a bit unwieldy.  That's not necessarily a bad
thing :-).  Delighted to see all the interest in Alpha, even if it took
"the community" a while to wake up.)

Agreed that Steve Langasek is a logical/necessary person to contact if
this revival has a chance of succeeding.

As far as what I can bring to the table, I won't be able to test OS
installers unless my system has a meltdown making a complete reinstall
necessary: my Alpha is part of my operational infrastructure.  On the
other hand, I *have* committed to running "sid" since that's the only
way I've been able to stay reasonably current: I tend to encounter
problems early :-).  I can test the basic sanity of alpha-specific
kernels, but usually run a kernel built from the kernel.org release
candidate source tree to avoid potential problems with "initrd".  I'm
familiar enough with the Debian package building process to roll my own
when things break badly enough to require the effort: at various times
over the past 2-3 years I've had to build custom versions of large chunks
of X11, firefox, udevd, aboot, and glibc.  The PWS 433au is definitely
*not* a fire-breather by modern standards, i.e., firefox builds take on
the order of eight hours, so while I can test the build process for
various packages, my machine is not a good candidate for builds requiring
quick turnaround.

Respectfully,
--Bob