Re: Secondary architectures and marketing

[Oliver Falk <oliver linux-kernel at>]

Matt Turner wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 3:59 AM, Oliver Falk <oliver linux-kernel at> wrote:
[ ... ]
> After working on the problem, Jay independently came to the exact
> solution Gentoo arrived at before. This, by definition, is duplication
> of effort.

Yes. That's duplication of effort. And as Jay said. Why did that happen? 
Because of the lack of communication. See my other mail. A common axp 
patches store would help a lot in this case.

Yes, a common distribution might also help. But again, some of us want 
to stick with there preferred distribution. I don't have anything 
against Debian, Gentoo and all the others. As long as people don't use 
commercial distributions, I'm happy.

However. I'm used to run RH since a long time. I'm one of the first 
Fedora contributors. And the reasons I want to stick with my distribution:
* I'm used to my tools (rpm, yum, koji, ...)
* I'm administrating ~ 12 private RH/Fedora servers
* I'm used to manage > 100 RH servers in my previous company
* I'm managing people who administrate RH servers in my current company

Matt. You ask me to use another distribution. Why don't you use another 
distribution?

> > > You, Oliver, and Jay are two of the best developers we have, and it
> > > seems to me to be such a waste of your time and effort to worry about
> > > hunting down a build error and generating RPMs.
> > Thx a lot for the flowers :-)
> >
> > Well, hunting down build errors is what we *have to do*. If we wouldn't do
> > that, we wouldn't have recent gcc, glibc, xulrunner, firefox, kernel, ...
> > And that we produce RPMs, well, we're packaging for Fedora. :-)
>
> Hunting down build errors is what you *have to do* to bring Fedora up
> the the current level of Gentoo. It's not as general a statement as
> you make it. Maybe _Fedora_ wouldn't have recent gcc, glibc,
> xulrunner, firefox, kernel, ... but these packages already exist in a
> working state elsewhere.

I don't know nothing about the current state of Gentoo/Alpha, I must 
say... I think it's great another distribution also has Alpha support.

Where can I find Gentoo AXP patches by the way?

> > > 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?
> > Sure. Fedora :-P
>
> I don't know if you intentionally dodge these questions or what.

See my above comment.

> Given the previous examples, I rhetorically ask wouldn't it be
> beneficial to work on a sole distribution, thereby preventing this
> wasteful duplication of effort.
>
> Surely you understood all this initially though.

[ ... ]

Matt. We all want *our* distribution to be *the one*. This will never 
happen on x86. It might happen on Alpha, but not today and not in near 
future.

Join efforts is a good idea though!

-of