Congratulations to the Debian team on the occasion of the Etch release
for the Alpha! I have my 21 CDs in hand, and will give them a good
working over on my PWS 433au beginning next week. Apologies for the
delay, but it's federal income tax season and I'll have no spare time
until after the 15th.
Of all the outstanding issues, potential and otherwise, the one of
greatest concern to me is the glibc threads and defunct processes one.
There has been a workaround available for many moons, and has been
successfully applied locally, but it's not a proper fix because it falls
in the category of "if it hurts when you smash your finger with a hammer,
then don't smash your finger with a hammer." What is the proper fix?
Early reports suggested the Alpha implementation of wait4() is flawed.
Later reports seemed to narrow it down a bit further, implicating the
"syscall4" mechanism.
Other annoyances (minor, but worth mentioning):
(1) "unaligned trap" messages in the system logs for various applications.
I honestly don't know how or to whom these should be reported. As far
as the package maintainers are concerned, the number of Alpha users
doesn't justify the effort to determine where the problem really lies,
i.e., is it related to source code constructs, or is this a problem
with the Alpha compilers and/or binutils?
(2) being unable to build firefox with gcc/g++ 4.X (compiler segfault
during build). firefox-1.5.X and -2.0.X build fine with gxx-3.4,
although it takes nearly eight hours for a build to finish due to
incredibly long "ld" times for some of the libraries. The good
news is, it works: linux-on-alpha users *can* have modern web
browsers :-).
Item (2) may be a non-issue with the stable versions of gxx-4.X in Etch.
I'll report back when I know one way or the other. Item (1) needs more
research, and I'll do what I can there as well. Anyone else running
radvd (IPv6 support)? Version 1.0-1 of that package is what's generating
most of the "unaligned trap" messages I'm seeing.
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Bob Tracy WTO + WIPO = DMCA? http://www.anti-dmca.org
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