Hi!
So where are we at with alpha currently?
Xorg-1.5
As some of you know, xorg-1.5 abandoned the "classic" way of
interfacing with PCI and AGP cards in favor of using
libpciaccess. That, in turn expects support from the kernel in
the form of /sys/devicesresourceN files.
Unfortunately, alpha until recently hat no support for those PCI
resources (which is partly due to the way alpha IO space is
structured and partly due to a crucial extension not being
available on old Alphas (older than EV5).
As such, we weren't able to keyword or stabilize Xorg-1.5 until
recently, when 2.6.30-rc* saw support finally being added.
Naturally, packages depending on >=xorg-1.5 had to be held off,
too.
The -rc kernels are keyworded ~alpha so people can test. So far,
-rc3 and rc4 are looking good, so we will keyword xorg and deps
soon (I'm aiming for this weekend) and if all goes well, we will
have it stable, soon.
Note that this will mean that people with EV4-Alphas will *not*
be able to use Xorg-1.5 just now. I feel that those machines are
so slow that very few will run X11 anyway, if there are Gentoo
installations on those to start with.
Glibc/Toolchain
---
Glibc has had a bug for ages (regarding ceil() and friends, bug
number 264335) which should really be fixed. Upstream is umm..
their usual selves about it. On top, a patch for fdatasync() (bug
264336) is available which upstream... well, you get it.
Workload
Currently, the alpha arch team consists of me (the nominal lead)
and armin76 who helps a lot with getting stable request answered
in a timely manner.
Also, we're in the process of recruiting mattst88 as an arch
tester. He's currently deep in exam-land at university, so the
process is on hold for now.
Users/Community
---
Aside from those on the team and one or two other devs, I've had
little to no direct feedback from Gentoo alpha users. I try to
write about Alpha regularly on my blog (available on the planet)
and I'm easily reachable as Blackb|rd on Freenode (#gentoo-alpha,
naturally).
I've been toying with the idea of offering something akin to
Debians popularity contest tool. Some people are rather
uncomfortable with data gathering tools that send stuff to some
strangers, so I don't know how well it would work. I list this
idea here, since I have just about no idea what actual alpha
hardware is used with Gentoo out there. Knowing which packages
are actually *used* (instead of just being stabilized for the
heck of it) would be nice. Added benefit of that would be that
users helping with testing would reduce workload.
In essence: we're busy and I'd love to get more feedback what
people (both users and devs) think we could do better, or
more/less of.
Regards,
Tobias,
who turned 42 in octal today
--
The only problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes,
trouble shoots back.
