Re: Secondary architectures and marketing

[Oliver Falk <oliver linux-kernel at>]

Jay Estabrook wrote:
> Matt Turner wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Oliver Falk <oliver linux-kernel at> wrote:
> > > > Jay Estabrook mentioned to me that he just got xulrunner to compile
> > > > again, but only with -O0. If this was ever an issue with Gentoo, it's
> > > > long since fixed.
> > > -O0 is already gone with the latest build (it's -O2 now). We now only have
> > > --no-relax, passed to the linker.
> > Which obviously isn't the point.
> >
> > It took time and effort to do something that was already done
> > elsewhere. By the way, this is also the exact solution used for some
> > time on Gentoo.
>
> And was the solution made (truly) public? Where?
>
> Duplicated effort, true, but why WAS it duplicated?
>
> Sure, I read about some custom xulrunner compiles under Debian with
> relax and such, but nothing "dpkg'ed", and nothing from Gentoo; ie,
> nothing definitive from anywhere.
>
> I confess, I'm as guilty as others; Fedora/Alpha has had (mostly) working
> Xserver 1.4.99+ since November, and the patches have gone nowhere else,
> AFAIK...

That's not really true Jay. The packages are at buildsys in koji. 
Everyone could have looked at it. But it's true, that there was no 
official: Hey, guys look what patches we have, that might also help 
*you* (Debian, Gentoo, ...).

> > > > It's a hard question Oliver, but don't you feel that it might be better
> > > > for the architecture to join up efforts on one distribution?
>
> I think this is the crux: "one distribution".
>
> Who will pick it?
>
> Regardless of which, Alpha will lose because of "it".
>
> Folks develop where they are comfortable and "know the ropes".

Right!!!

> Asking me, born/bred on RH since 2.1 (and that's NOT Fedora Core 2 :-),
> to become comfortable enough with the Debian and/or Gentoo
> "ropes", would be counter-productive, AT THIS POINT.
>
> In the future, if there is finally only one Alpha distro standing, folks
> still interested to develop for Alpha will have to make their own decision
> on the changeover effort they are willing to pay.
>
> > Please justify Fedora/Alpha.
>
> Justifying any distro to be "the one", is, IMHO, a waste of time.
>
> What would be better, again IMHO, would be an Alpha "clearinghouse",
> where potentially common issues that ALL Alpha distros may face would be
> able to be discussed and solved AND TOSE SOLUTIONS MADE PUBLIC.

There are a few options from my side:
* http://wiki.linux-kernel.at/index.php/AlphaCore
* http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ArchTeam
* http://redhat.at

> Initially, there was a linux-alpha KML from "vger" that played the
> part, at least with kernel-related stuff, but it's long dead, AFAIK.
>
> I thought that axp-list had become a good bit more distro-agnostic of late,
> but it's now glaring obvious that it hasn't, or at least not enough, for
> whatever reason(s).
>
> Perhaps resurrecting alphalinux.info and its forums would work?

You mean alphalinux.org, I guess?

-of