Today I received my emailed copy of the Mandrake Community Newsletter (if you didn't get a copy you can find it online here: http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=2010&lang=en ).
In it was a quote from Stew talking about how 8.2/ppc was coming along. But really (no offense to Stew) considering the way things are truly going it seems rather pr'ish. And frankly I have to wonder considering Mandrake's announced money problems if PPC isn't one of the projects that they are or have made a hard decision about. Many of you aren't aware of this probably but Stew has been "fighting the system" just to get us a PPC distribution. By that I mean the following: a) Stew is not able to delete anything from the mirrors. For example there are netscape locale packages still up there. But Stew doesn't have enough access to the cluster machine in order to remove the files. b) When Stew does add files to the distribution he's unable to regenerate the hdlists files and so on. THis makes doing network installs off the mirrors impossible. Frankly, the Mandrake-devel/cooker/ppc mirrors are pretty much worthless for testing. The only reasonable way to test is to use the ISOs that Stew produces for us and then update select packages from the mirrors. I guess the way I see this is. Either Mandrake isn't truly committed to producing a quality PPC distribution or this is already a dead project as far as they see it. I really can't see how hard it can be to give the primary person working on the distribution access to update it's files. X86 sure as heck doesn't have this problem. So Mandrake if you're going to abandon us or just don't care please let us know so we can spend our time on something worthwhile. It'll really be too bad because at this point in time Mandrake is already the best PPC distribution there is. But I find it difficult to see it moving forward without such simple support as Stew being able to update the files on the cluster that get shoved out to the mirrors. If you feel the same way please speak up. Perhaps if enough of us speak up about this issue Mandrake will either realize there is a market for the product or realize the mistake in not allowing Stew to update the distribution. Furthermore, I encourge you all if you haven't already done so to make a donation to Mandrake and flag it for the PowerPC Port. You can do so here: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/donations/ -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy? - Ghandi
