On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 02:49:49AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > So your point in posting was to make insulting rhetorical comparisons and > browbeat developers into carrying on supporting an architecture that has > ceased to be useful to them (and almost everyone else in the world)?
No my point was that the desire to keep a machine running isn't always about efficiency or cost. I have never been under the impression that anyone involved with Debian is being made to do anything. If Debian was only interested in what is useful to the majority of people, then it wouldn't support most of the architectures that it does or even most of the packages, so that would appear to not be a relevant criteria. > If people love being able to keep their alphas running, let them step up to > do the work. Right now all I see is a dying port, and I'm trying to make > sure that the last one out turns off the lights. That's fiar. I should do more work. Winter is less busy than the summer generally, so time to do something. > There's the list of failed packages, as well as > <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > (which is a lot more informative than I expected it to be, really). And > then there's the need for someone to take care of the kernel builds on an > ongoing basis, and the particular issues that you quoted from my mail. > > Does "doable" mean that this is something that you're going to try to do? I should do something, so I will check what video cards are in the various alphas I have (I haven't had these that long) and if one of them has the relevant card I might as well try to get that working. So far my first fight was trying to even install anything on these alphas, given two require milo, and one has the lovely IDE DMA bug (I think I will switch to scsi on that one) which seems to affect many pws433au's. > It's great that Debian can fill so many different needs for different > people, but frankly, if your goal is to show that you can keep old hardware > working, you don't need a supported, recent OS to do that, and I don't think > the Debian project should carry a port along for no other reason than this. No it doesn't need to. I still think that argument would tend to work against the majority of new ports too where there are very few users too, although they do have the difference than they are trying to get new hardware going rather than keep old hardware going. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]