Re: For the Abolishment of "Ports"
On Wed, Aug 11, 1999 at 09:48:35AM -0700, David Bristel wrote:
> While I agree that being completely i386 oriented on the web page, I will point
> out that the vast majority of systems out there are x86 based(I don't like the
> i386 since I've prefered AMD CPUs over Intel since the 486 days). This being
> the case, I'd suggest going to a more even "homepage", with the focus being all
> the different platforms. So on the homepage, we would simply have X86, MIPS,
> Alpha, M68K, etc... as the links, each of which would have it's own news page.
> This may seem like it would fragment out the different flavors of Debian, but it
> would at least make it appear that we are being impartial about which platform
> gets the most focus. I would also like to propose that we get away from having
> a single version number to cover each platform. The reason for this is that we
> can release for individual platforms at different times, and not hold up the
> release for one platform that may have problems. The version numbers will
> remain consistant for the features, but I will point out that glibc 2.1 was
> released into Sparc when slink was released, while it was not yet implemented in
> the other distributions. If we set a feature list for Potato, it should be
> consistant across the different platforms.
>
Your system would require a lot more manpower to keep the web pages
up to date. This would simply lead to the web pages for some ports being
chronically out of date. Besides, that manpower could be much better used
improving the distribution.
I also agree with a previous responder that the different architectures should
be treated equally. When setting up the pages for the different ports, I
considered using separate pages for each port and quickly abandoned the
approach for a number of reasons. People from the various ports agreed.
As far as package numbering is concerned, this is a much bigger issue and
would need to be discussed on debian-devel. Don't get your hopes up about
getting anywhere with that suggestion though. :) Only a small percentage
of packages need to be compiled specially for each architecture. Once a
port advances far enough, they can auto-compile most packages and do quite
a good job of 'keeping up' with the i386 port.
Jay Treacy
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