Hello,
Thanks for the feedback on the idea. Now, I would like to summarise some
points that aroused in your replies.
1) MandrakeSoft might be reluctant to take the non-Intel ports under it's
wings. This of course makes sense (as Stefan noticed, support = money, and
we cannot ask the company for it in it's current state). I (and I think we
all do) understand this (unofficial) position and respect it.
2) We (the community) have resources to keep the cooker tree up to date,
with exception of Drak* tools. Thou they are important, they're not
absolutely essential for development of the port 'per se'. What we need is
up to date tree of cooker, and probably plf packages. With current
resources this is doable. I've seen the schedule of 9.2 and realised, that
"syncing" ports to it would be a bit of Hercules' job. However with more
machines to rebuild packages (and with centralised and automated extranet)
we may be able to make it for the next release. At this point, about 12
months in the future we might be able to talk again to MandrakeSoft about
possible "non-official" releases, that would stay community supported, but
with worksing Drak* suite. Up to this point, CSC can provide required
space for the ports on it's ftp server.
3) Most of the development machines are (or could be) located behind a
front-end computer that would act as proposed extranet gateway and
temporary storage. I think, that central storage node could be located at
CSC, as we can
a) guarantee the support for the system for the following 12 months by
some sort of "public agreement" (think Debian's "contract")
b) provide ftp server for the ports (we have both computer and network
resources to do that).
4) Machines in other locations will have the same, unrestricted access
through the extranet. All rebuild packages could be automatically copied
to the storage node (30GB makes sense, I think).
5) From your mail, it seems that we /MIGHT/ be able to run the porting for
the following architectures: Alpha, (Mips?), PPC, Sparc64 (32?) and
X86_64.
6) The access to the extranet would be granted both to community developers
and core, MandrakeSoft developers.
7) It's important to realise, that even if we successfully port everything
to other architectures, MandrakeSoft might not be able to offer the ports
as officially supported products. In that case we should have enough
resources to supply patched packages for at least 18 months. This of
course is personal decision of every developer, however I would strongly
encourage you to pursue this goal (again, think Debian :). Mandrake Linux
has strong community and I'm sure that some of us would do it.
"Where do we go from here, is up to you."
PS. I'm working on that XP1000 :)
--
Jaroslaw Zachwieja
Centre for Scientific Computing
University of Warwick
