Bug#340298: www.debian.org/ports unclear about ia64
Package: www.debian.org
Severity: important
www.debian.org/ports says about ia64:
"This is a port to Intel's 64-bit architecture."
Without further any warning/information about that other 64bit architecture
intel, amd etc are producing: amd64. A *lot* of people try to use ia64
installation media to install Debian on their Opteron's etc, and then mail
(for example) debian-cd that the cd is broken and doesn't boot.
The paragraph in question could and IMHO should be more elaborate, like,
saying it's Intel *alpha* 64, aka Itanium, and mention it's a high-end
processor that's not available in consumer's computer shops at all, and
also mention there exists another 64-bit processer made by Intel and
others, that is *not* ia64, but rather 'amd64'.
The fact that i386 is also called ia32 above, without any introduction to
what ia32 means, isn't helping at all of course. If it doesn't serve
anything, I strongly suggest to drop the name of 'ia-32', I've never
heard of it before, while eh, I've been an i386 users for quite some time.
Mentioning 'Pentium', 'Sempron' etc would seem more useful to me, as that's
much more likely to be known to people than ia32 and even i386. Generally,
having a bit of availability info in the summary so that people can more
easily find which one's they need to look at. The m68k entry is a good
example of this.
I've X-Debbugs-Cc'd debian-ia64, who can maybe elaborate on this, or
correct me where I've been wrong (I know very little about ia64 myself).
(filed at important due to the huge amount of confusion this and maybe some
other debian.org pages cause in this regard).
Thanks,
--Jeroen
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-k7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
jeroen@wolffelaar.nl
http://jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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