On Tue Jun 10, 2003 at 12:32:10AM +0100, Jaroslaw Zachwieja wrote: My final post on this entire thread. I read it before replying to Stefan's post, so I'll give this one my last comments.
> Thou I started this, I tried to stay away from the conversation. I'm not a > programmer, just enthusiast with hardware and network resources to spare > for some good deed. > > Thanks to Mandrake I earn my salary. Thanks to Mandrake I'm free from > proprietary software to the extent I want to be. And in being so naive I > thought I should give Mandrake something in return. 5 EUR for Mandrake > Club? Well, I thought that I can do better than that. So I hanged around > CookerML and noticed, that the state of non-Intel ports is pretty poor. So > I decided to contribute. My time, CSC resources and more important good > will. Others caught the idea, I managed to get some hardware and we're > building VPN and support infrastructure (local rsync, ftp and other less > important things) around it. > > Now we hear, that what we do is futile. That MandrakeSoft doesn't care > about "non mainstream", "commercially unexploitable", in other words 'ran > by a handfull of geeks' software anymore. HELLO!!! LINUX TO BASE!!! Where did you hear it was futile? Good grief! The misconceptions on this list are so astounding it's a wonder I bother reading any of this at all! Where did you hear Mandrake doesn't care about mainstream? Perhaps not enough to deal with cooker *at this time* for some of these ports, but you can see that by selling Corporate Server for x86_64, for selling PPC ports, etc. that MandrakeSoft does care about these other ports. If we didn't, we likely wouldn't invest the time, effort, and money into even having bothered with those ports to begin with. You missed the entire point of everything I wrote, kinda like others on this list. Words I wrote get twisted around and sound nothing like what they were meant to be. Folks, you need to learn to *read* what is written and not gloss over it and make gross assumptions. > I think you're missing the big picture. Lack of real cross-platform > abilities of Mandrake MAKES it a less popular distribution. If I need to > set up a Linux workstation on different hardware than x86, I'll go for > good 'ol rusty Debian (no offence to Debian developers, it's the way it's > meant to be) and forget about Mandrake. And when someone makes a chuckely > comment on it, all I can do is say "they're working on it". I know that > Intel based desktop is THE MONEY, but to build a brand you need more than > that. Especially, when someone wants to do the dirty job for you, just for > the sake of it. Right, and unless I've missed something, we are still in Chapter 11 protection. This means money is a commodity we desperately need. So until we get out of the water and back on the fast track with cash in the bank and some money to burn on projects like this, you'll just have to accept that this may not be feasible for MandrakeSoft to *officially* support. So where is the crime in concentrating on what is going to turn a profit when turning a profit is what we need to stay in business? There is no point in working on something like this, even if it is 80-90% community driven *at this time* when there is no money to spend on it. Once the money is flowing, then this sort of thing can be more plausible, but at this time, I just don't see it being realistic. Frankly, having the developers concentrate on x86 and bringing in the money to keep us all *employed* is, in my mind, a good thing. > It's not enough to say "we're working on it" and save some bandwidth on > distributing the packages. There are people like here in CSC with both > bandwith and other resources to support you. There are people that > need/want to test what you do on the cooker and provide feedback. HELLO, > that's why cooker was born, right? But no, instead of testing our bollocks > off with the cooker for [whatever $arch rings your bell] the hardware sits > in the server room crunching endless numbers of cooker packages just to > keep it up to date with i586 version. This is bad. Ummm.. has anyone *stopped* you from doing this? No. Has anyone said you shouldn't do this? No. Has anyone even implied that this is not something appropriate for the community to do. *NO*. Again, gross misinterpretation of what is being written. My whole point in jumping in on this thread was to clear up some misunderstandings that a some ports (I'll use the word "some" again so folks can obssess about it some more) were unsupported. Contrary to popular belief, the world does not revolve around cooker. Yes, sorry to burst your bubble. Because there is no cooker/ia64 doesn't mean IA64 is not supported. Likewise for PPC and x86_64. You people can do whatever you like and more power to you. I think it's great that you want to build Mandrake for alpha and sparc and mips and, while you're at it, can you port it to replace PalmOS? I think that's awesome. Go hard. Get together, do your thing, and start churning out the ports. Got the bandwidth to spare? Excellent! Host it there as well. Please! No one is stopping you, no one is suggesting you should stop, least of all me. What skin is it off our backs, and what cost is there to MandrakeSoft, for the community to build, host and independantly work on rebuilding cooker for other archs? None. It's when people start insisting that they become official products of MandrakeSoft that I start to become concerned, because while everyone here is happy living in cooker-land, some of us have to deal with post-release support, and that means fixing bugs, building updates, etc. Kinda hard to build Mandrake 9.2/mips without a mips machine. *That* was my point, along with clarification of supported archs. If you guys felt it necessary to read more into it than that, it is *your* problem to deal with, not mine. > All we need is simple (minimalistic even) and universal cooker installer, > bootable off floppy, in network mode for the platforms we'd like to work > on. Is this that much? I don't know. I won't even pretend to know. You'd have to ask Pixel or GC about that. But you make it sound rather trivial, so why doesn't someone hack this up for your platforms and submit patches back? I'm sure Pixel and GC will have a hard time tuning the installation routines and whatnot for an arch they've never seen before, let alone have the opportunity to work on. > Keep the ---> GREAT <--- work on the i586 distribution. Focus on it. Let us > work out the rest. You are (IMHO) the only company in Linux world that can > benefit from such a tremendous community support. Please, don't tell us > that we're bunch of freaks just because we want to run something we like > and consider usefull on other architectures than supported by you. Look at > PLD (http://www.pld.org.pl) from zero to local hero in less than two > years. What makes it brilliant? Good package management (as good as > Mandrake's imho) and... i386, i586, i686, sparc, alpha and PPC ports > available. Again: - no one is stopping you; go hard - no one called you freaks; making silly assumptions on your part I really can't stand it when people put words in my mouth (and I can only assume it's my mouth because I'm really the only one without the sense to keep my trap shut). > Cmon, MandrakeSoft, we're on your side! > > My $0.02... My last recommendation: go for it. I wish you the best of luck. I won't be around any longer to hear of your success so I guess you can get Stefan to write your press release once you have something to back it up to let me know how it goes. No need to reply to this, I won't be reading. Enough of my time has been wasted on this thread without any positive results that I just can't in good conscience contribute anymore. -- MandrakeSoft Security; http://www.mandrakesecure.net/ Online Security Resource Book; http://linsec.ca/ "lynx -source http://linsec.ca/vdanen.asc | gpg --import" {FE6F2AFD : 88D8 0D23 8D4B 3407 5BD7 66F9 2043 D0E5 FE6F 2AFD}
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