Package: wnpp Greetings,
I'm afraid my last piece of alpha hardware has gone out the door, and I am no longer a linux-alpha or debian-alpha user. :-( I'll have fond memories of the machines and of lists like this one and linux-alpha, as this was my first Linux platform, and my demonstration of its performance/price in the late 90s initiated a Linux transition at my former employer, in no small part thanks to the volunteer help I got, and hopefully gave back. Oh well. More importantly for this list, I am no longer able to maintain the DEC->Compaq->HP alpha compiler and math library installers, nor the "free fast math" libffm of Goto and Wesner. Unfortunately this means I need to orphan them, and hope they find a maintainer. libffm should be in good shape and, as far as I know, need little to no maintenance at all, unless someone wants to add to the library. Upstream has long since stopped supporting it, and though some of its code has migrated to glibc, it has some unique and extremely fast/powerful vectorized functions. For example dsqrtiv() very rapidly performs 1/sqrt(x) for an array of doubles; this function on the fastest alpha may still be faster than glibc on the fastest Xeon or Opteron for this purpose. As for the others, because a three year campaign to get Compaq to let me distribute the non-free libraries and (encrypted) compilers hit dead ends, the biggest maintenance hassle is updating the debconf templates to keep track of the elusive download URLs. They also have template translation bugs open which I never got to, and which will be dealt with by NMUs around the end of this month; apologies to the translation authors for the delay. These too are long since abandoned by upstream, and gcc/glibc have been catching up to them in performance, so their need is not clear at this point. Sorry about the sudden nature of this right before the etch release. I should have anticipated the effect of this change on my packages long ago and done something preemptive about it. :-( Best wishes for the continued upkeep of this great architecture and platform! Regards, -Adam -- GPG fingerprint: D54D 1AEE B11C CE9B A02B C5DD 526F 01E8 564E E4B6 Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe! http://www.take6.com/albums/greatesthits.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
