Secondary architectures and marketing

[Steven Moix]

Hello Oliver,

On Sat, 2008-12-13 at 21:15 +0100, Oliver Falk wrote:
> Oh yes. Jay and I are still very active. :-)
> There are some people who contribute CPU power from time to time. And 
> others who help compiling things...

That's another point I'd like to talk about. I have no idea how I can
help if you don't ask on the list ;). As far as I can tell, you need CPU
time to recompile the "older" packages from the "F9 alpha vs. F9" tree
on http://buildsys.zero42.at/status/, am I right?

What is this tree anyway, is it compared against the Fedora 9 base DVD
only or the current Fedora 9 + all the updates?

> I've introduced myself to Paul at LinuxTag2008 in Berlin and asked him 
> regarding SecArch. I don't remember exactly what he said, but the last 
> information I have is, that there is a space problem...

Are you talking about Paul Frields?

> I also had a (mail-)conversation with Mike (McLean) a few weeks ago, 
> because I've seen some scripts in koji git. Script that will help to 
> "mirror the list of packages to be built to SecArch koji's" - I hope 
> this way to describe it in one setence isn't too wrong. :-)

Great, as long as you keep pushing the idea regularly I'm happy. :)

> > The wiki page [2] seems completely outdated
> 
> True, true. My fault. I'm very busy and Jay is trying to fix X most of 
> the time. Again. We could really need some help. Especially in 
> organizing, documentation and fixing packages... 2 People for (what? 
> 6.4k pkgs is *hard*!).
> 
>  > and alphacore.info doesn't
> > even work anymore (is Mike Barnes gone?), which leads me to the second
> > proposition.
> 
> I've asked Mike via mail some time ago. No reaction yet.... /me is 
> thinking about talking the domain... And maybe just redirect it to 
> SecArch pages on fpo.

Frankly, I don't think that Alphacore is an appropriated name anymore,
since Fedora dropped the Core part. If you really want a domain name to
get some visibility until we get integrated in Fedora as a secondary
architecture, I suggest alphadora.org. It isn't a bad name after all.

> > The bottom line is that currently there is no way anyone can even know
> > that an alpha port for Fedora exists, wouldn't it be more fun to have
> > more visibility and users?
> 
> True. True. We are quite 'hidden'. On the other hand. We are not really 
> hidden, because we are talking on IRC (at least me) in #AlphaCore and 
> #alpha. We are also having conversation via the alpha mailinglist. And 
> we are visible via bugs (rh bz, gnu bz and others)....

We are not that many, so I that that the mailinglist is still the
central place to be, but a small Wordpress-based website could be cool
too to get some visibility. I can take care of this if you want.

> AH! One thing, that is currently a BLOCKER. There's no glibc alpha 
> maintainer any more... I've already asked via bz what skills someone who 
> would takeover this job would need, but no answer yet.... If it doesn't 
> depend on hardcore-deep c knowledge, I could do it myself... If they 
> want me to do so. :-)

I'm sooo not a C programmer, can't help much :)

Steven