PPC Port pages: dynamic "supported model list" and poll
Hi
I am heading to this list due to a recent discussion held on debian-powerpc, which
developed into a debian-www discussion.
To make it (relatively) short: The page (sitting on the debian-powerpc port pages) which
lists the supported models is quite outdated by now. Well, you say, ok,
that's clear because this is a list containing all models supported by potato
which is our stable release. No one is interested in everything else, and,
when woody comes out, there will of course be a new list (which of course will also be outdated quite quickly after release..).
I (and a lot of other guys over at www-powerpc [like Chris Tillman]) realised
this as there were mails coming in from time to time regarding the question if
the powerpc port is still existing. The people coming in on our pages saw
an outdated list and thought, uuhmm, ok, my newest model isn't listed here, so no
chance to run debian on my new TiBook, moving ahead to www.redhat.com,
www.suse.de, ...
Now the idea was to put up a list which, on the one hand lists all currently
available models, and, on the other hand, the releases and the possibilities to
run them on a specific machine. E.g. something like:
Releases boot-floppies
Device woody potato woody potato
------------------------------------
Apple Computer
abc x x x x
def x x
ghi x x x
jkl x* x x x
mno x** x x x
pqr x x
Motorola
stx
.
.
.
[* please upgrade to 2.4.x kernel to take full advantage of your system
** please use woody boot floppies for better install]
(This list can of course be altered, but just to get a impression of what I am
thinking of.)
The list would be changed dynamically, either when a new model comes out, or
support for an already existing model turns up, or a missing entry gets
reported by a user (also see poll idea below).
The second idea was to install a poll page. Something like a form-to-mail survey page
with buttons for all powerpc models, release, boot-floppies and a button with the
option running/not running, where newbies could report the status of their
systems, so, if it's running on their specific piece of hardware or not. With
the help of this form, we could provide status info about machines who are not
yet tested with the various debian releases, and therefore update the model
support list automatically. Of course there could also be a manual input
field, which can be parsed by the admin of the model page.
I btw saw a recent discussion about polls on this list, so maybe the poll could
also be done by a cgi script, which would provide immediate response to the
users input, and not just having the page updated once per day after all mails are
parsed by a script.
This may be also interesting for other ports?
Any points on this? Excuse my english for today, but Analysis and Algebra got
me hard...
BTW: I am not moving this topic to debian-www because I think such a page
should be set up and administrated by you (I would of course volunteer for it), but because we thought that there will be more insight and more active discussion than on debian-powerpc.
--
Kind regards,
Andi
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