Hello,
Our build and testing machine which was graciously hosted for free for
many years has been decommissioned. I had planned to host an
AlphaServer ES47 and a DS20L at a local university, but the DS20L blew
a capacitor and the ES47 has never been stable enough to warrant using
it for much more than a personal testing machine. I personally have
other machines (UP1500, PC164{,LX,BX,SX}, DP264) but they're not ideal
for building installation media and offering remote build testing
access to multiple developers. I also have 2x 600MHz DS10Ls which
could presumably be hosted at OSUOSL, but again, single CPU 600MHz
systems are pretty useless as a replacement for our quad-CPU ES40.
Ideally we'd have the DS20L fixed and the ES47 stabilized and then
continue using them. That would require:
(1) I would be able to replace the capacitors on the DS20L and have it
working again, but I tried and the new ones blew up too, so that's
evidently just a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself.
Electrical engineering advice required if this is to be fixed.
(2) I would be able to figure out what's causing the ES47 to be
unstable. It seems to lock up under load but I haven't really made
much progress beyond that.
So we're considering various options. Should we stop alpha support all
together? Should we replace stable alpha keywords with ~alpha? Should
we make the alpha profiles unstable and allow dependency breakage?
Should we try to find another suitable build machine and host it?
I guess the answer to some of these will depend on how many
Gentoo/alpha users there are. I personally would like to keep alpha
support alive, while reducing the amount of work to keep it going.
So, do we have users? Do they have opinions? Can they offer help?
Thanks,
Matt
