Re: RH 6.0 on alpha stability?

["B. James Phillippe" <bryan terran org>]

On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Barrett G. Lyon wrote:

> >I use an Intel RH6.0 for my main system because they work better at
> >those other things and since most of the SW is still developed on 32 bit

I wouldn't go that far.  FWIW, I personally have found RH6/Alpha to be the
most stable, complete and current RH/Alpha release so far.  Discounting the
kernel-related stuff, which I never use RPM's for anyway.  There are
several packages which were never put through any sort of QA cycle (some of
which I just fix), but for the most part if you keep up with the updates it
seems to work out.

My AlphaStation is primarily used as a development workstation w/kde,
sound, cd-ripping.

In any case, most of the software bugs I find in packages for Alpha are the
fault of crappy coding by the original author; not RedHat.  Although, as I
said, it would help if RH developed a formal QA process.

As for the comment about SW still being developed for 32-bit archs, I have
two responses:

1.) [in user space] code that is 32-bit dependant is probably broken by way
of ignorance and not intention.  Often, programs that are not X-bit clean
are also not endian-clean, write-ordering clean, etc.

2.) Not having Netscape is probably the biggest boon for stability of
Linux/Alpha. ;-)

cheers,
-bp
--
# bryan at terran dot org
# http://www.terran.org/~bryan