Alpha Source Code?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Tom Linden wrote:

>>Fedora Core is developed internally at Red Hat on 7 different
>>architectures simultaneously.  Every single RPM package that gets 
>>built in our internal "rawhide" collection instance, is 
>>automatically built on all 7 architectures.  The architectures 
>>include:
>>
>>x86
>>AMD64
>>ia64
>>ppc
>>ppc64
>>s390
>>s390x
>
>Be interesting if you could % figures along side those architectures
>indicating redhat shipmets.

For Fedora Core, we currently only provide x86 and AMD64 official 
OS releases, but provide the rpms of everything that builds, so 
others can work together on ppc/ppc64/etc. that we don't (yet) do 
officially.  It's more or less impossible to get any sort of idea 
how many users of Fedora Core there is for a given architecture 
though, as it's mirrored via ftp/http/bittorrent, as well as 3rd 
party CDROMs, etc.

While specific percentages are not available, AMD64 seems to be
gaining more and more traction over time as more and more
hobbiests jump to the easy path to 64bit computing.  There is
quite a bit of interest in the community and internally at Red
Hat for an official PPC port of Fedora Core, and it looks like
there may be a possibility to see an official release for PPC/Mac
sometime in the future.  When this might happen is really a
function of volunteer effort both internally and externally 
though, but I wouldn't be surprised if PPC ended up being the 3rd 
official port sometime down the line.

All other architectures above seem to just not have enough
hobbiest interest at this time for there to be an official Fedora 
Core port to any of them.  For sparc, there's some interest from 
the Auroralinux folk I think, but I think Tom et al. are happy 
enough with auroralinux as it stands now too, and it's probably 
better off that way for now.

For Alpha, there's some internal interest to do an official
Fedora Core port, and even been some engineering done towards
that, however it's all done in volunteer time, where such time 
is a very scarce resource for all concerned.  The Alphacore 
project seems to be the best way to go for Alpha for the time 
being I believe.

I doubt anyone would have accurate numbers for rpm downloads 
per-arch though.

-- 
Mike A. Harris        ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer   -   X11 Developer   -   Red Hat