"Noah L. Meyerhans" <noahm@debian.org> writes: > On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 08:41:43PM +0200, Riku Voipio wrote: >> So, debian is coming the netbsd of Linuxes.. Sure a novel goal to >> support rare hardware, but why does ot have to come at the expense >> of commodity hardware owners? > > That's an interesting comparison. If you look at NetBSD, you'll see > that they have a very similar problem to us: They have a really slow > release cycle. I think at some point it really does come down to the > size of the OS. At some point, I suspect that the Debian community is > going to have to decide what it wants. Will it be frequent, up-to-date > releases, or will it be support for every platform we can get our hands > on? I don't think we can have both. What I fail to understand is why Debian insists on supporting every single arch itself. Why not pick a handful of arches we do give a flying fuck about, support those, and if some organization wants to port Debian to another arch, then let them fork and support it themselves (like Redhat->Yellow Dog)? > People will undoubtedly say something to the effect of "well, if > somebody's willing to do the work to support some new architecture, we > shouldn't discourage them. They're not interfering with our ability to > do our work." Is that necessarily true, though? It's been pretty > clearly stated that Debian will not release sarge until the new > installer is ready. How long will we wait for the various ports to get > to an installable state? If we wait indefinitely, that haven't the > ports that aren't yet ready interfered with the users and developers of > the other ports we support?' Debian's support for so many arches slows down development in other areas as well. For example, getting gcc-3.2 working on all arches has held the GCC transition back for several months now, which in turn has held back KDE 3.x, which in turn has held back hundreds of KDE apps, which in turn has spawned stupid threads like this gentoo thread... -- Curse my natural showmanship!
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