On Sat Jun 07, 2003 at 08:55:46PM +0200, Stefan van der Eijk wrote: > <IMHO> > Releasing means supporting. supporting a product requires an > organisation and knowledge being available. It also needs to be > worthwhile --> bring some $$$ to the company. For the alpha, mips, > pa-risc and sparc the market is too small. > > Since I'm more or less the maintainer of the alpha port, I've had some > interesting discussions with mdk employees on this topic. I don't have > the illusion that the alpha port will ever turn into a "product" that > will be supported and even bring revenue to mdk. I see it as my personal > research project --> I want to prove that maintaining multiple ports can > be done efficiently... > </IMHO>
Also, don't forget updates. Unless the people who build these ports are willing to maintain a system/chroot/whatever dedicated for 18mos for building updates for these ports, it won't happen. As Stefan says, making this stuff "official" means it needs to be maintained; without having access to these various machines for the duration of the lifecycle, it's not even worth starting it. That being said, there is nothing from stopping a community built/community hosted unofficial port; the community builds the port, the community maintains the port, and MandrakeSoft doesn't have any official dealings with it (ie. the community completely and 100% supports it themselves). For alpha, mips, pa-risc, and sparc, I think that would be the best shot. You could like talk ibiblio or someone into hosting the port if you wanted to make an "unofficial 9.2/pa-risc" release (or whatever). For PPC, I'd love to see it released in tangent with x86 (as well as x86-64 and ia64 I guess). -- MandrakeSoft Security; http://www.mandrakesecure.net/ Online Security Resource Book; http://linsec.ca/ "lynx -source http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import" {FE6F2AFD : 88D8 0D23 8D4B 3407 5BD7 66F9 2043 D0E5 FE6F 2AFD}
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