Secondary architectures and marketing

Matt Turner mattst88 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 12 22:13:46 UTC 2009


Hi Jay,

Glad you joined in. :)

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Jay Estabrook <Jay.Estabrook at hp.com> wrote:
> Matt Turner wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Oliver Falk <oliver at 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?
>

Not in that it was put on a public web page, but yes in that one could
check xulrunner's ebuild and see the following lines.

	# It doesn't compile on alpha without this LDFLAGS
	use alpha && append-ldflags "-Wl,--no-relax"


> Duplicated effort, true, but why WAS it duplicated?
>

Excellent point. Communication (lack of) is really a huge problem here.

This problem is immediately fixed by working with one distribution.

> 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...
>

Yes, and I've asked you for those patches a couple times. Please put
them somewhere public.

>>>> 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?
>

Ideally, there'd be a consensus based on a few factors: maturity,
man-power, future support.

So we have three distributions currently. Debian appears likely to
drop Alpha support following the Lenny release. For sake of argument,
we'll remove it.

We're left with Fedora and Gentoo. In terms of maturity, Gentoo is in
better shape. Man-power: Fedora has only two developers. In fairness,
Gentoo has two _active_ developers, but others who could be called on
for support. (I'm not a Gentoo developer, but I certainly do what I
can.)

> Regardless of which, Alpha will lose because of "it".
>
> Folks develop where they are comfortable and "know the ropes".
>
> 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.
>

I understand the difficulty in switching distributions, but the amount
of effort required to learn Gentoo and and Portage pales in comparison
to putting together your own distribution.

By the way, Gentoo does binary packages too. I've started to push for
some kind of official binary package repository for older, slower
machines given the pending demise of Debian.

> 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.
>

That's not was I was asking. I was asking for justification for
Fedora/Alpha and not justification for it to be the sole distribution.

But you've really addressed this already, so question answered.

> 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.
>

I agree absolutely. It's just difficult to herd people to one central
location (similar to herding everyone to one distribution.)

I'm not exactly sure what the correct solution is yet.

> 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.
>

Yes, there's no activity in the last month.

> 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?
>

No, no, no.

This is exactly what I'm trying to make alphalinux.org into. We've set
up a wiki and are pestering people to add content.

I'm planning to revamp the main site with a content management system
and add a forum.

If we could get an archive of the AlphaCore.info forums, this would be nice.

Thanks,

Matt




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