Yes.<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.
Yes.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).
We first need to get our act together :-) The alpha port is still on the mdk mirrors at the moment. I can imaging that mdk perhaps won't do the same for the other ports that have sprung up lately.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).
Yes. Have release schedules been published for these products?For PPC, I'd love to see it released in tangent with x86 (as well as x86-64 and ia64 I guess).
Stefan
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