Dear Alpha fans, In August of last year, I posed the question to the debian-alpha mailing list: should Debian continue to support an alpha port following the release of lenny?
http://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2008/08/msg00004.html As would be expected when making such a post to the debian-alpha list, there were a number of responses from users who expressed dismay at the prospect of Debian no longer supporting alpha in squeeze. Also unsurprisingly (to me, given my observations that had led to the post in the first place), no one else has yet stepped up to be an alpha porter for squeeze. I linked to <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-al...@lists.debian.org> as a starting point for folks to get involved in trying to help with the alpha port if they want to see it continue in squeeze. Well, only 9 of those bugs have been closed in the past year, with 31 other bugs open, not to mention the serious problems of the port's viability implied by things like the lack of Java support and the general absence of a porter community. For Lenny, I was the sole Debian developer willing to put his name down as a porter on <http://wiki.debian.org/alphaLennyReleaseRecertification>. For Squeeze, I am not willing to put my name down without a significant show of committment on the part of other developers. By all rights, alpha shouldn't even have released with Lenny given the state of its porter support; it's effectively coasted for the past year (I haven't even had a running alpha for the past five months owing to a hardware failure), and I don't want to see it coast its way into Squeeze. I've cc:ed everyone who listed themselves as an alpha porter for etch on <http://wiki.debian.org/alphaEtchReleaseRecertification>, to make sure anyone willing to do the work on alpha for Squeeze has an opportunity to do so. But in the absence of some demonstration of committment in the next couple of weeks, on March 7 I'll plan to ask the ftp team and the release team to drop alpha from the archive for testing and unstable. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
