The State of Alpha Linux

[Matt Turner]

Hi,

> I've seen this day coming for a while.  The last usable distro was FC3 and we
> only got that because a couple of Russians gave up sleeping for a year.  If,
> as you say the basic libraries are becoming unusable, maybe the thing to do is
> put together one really good, working Aplpha distro with clean, usable
> libraries and sources.  A clean build of OpenOffice would be nice!

I'd obviously recommend Gentoo, but that's just me. Since, for better
or for worse, you compile everything, you're given more flexibility
with optional dependencies. Plus, there's none of this finding
EV5/EV56/PCA56/EV6 optimized binaries, since you specify how they're
compiled. Obviously, it's more painful for slower boxes though.

Anyway, I don't mean to advertise (too much :).

> mounts are handled better now .. what else?  Do we really need the latest and
> greatest?

Latest and greatest isn't exactly what I'm after. I'd be happy knowing
we were always going to be two revisionr behind. Unfortunately, when
X.Org leaves us behind, there's no guarantee we can get the relevant
bugs fixed to get ourselves caught up.

I try to do my part, but there are some things I'm not experienced
with and therefore unable to fix. The kernel bugs for instance. We
need someone like Ivan Kokshaysky, Richard Henderson, or Jay Estabrook
to step up fix those issues.

I'm not quite sure what happened to the glibc Alpha stuff. I thought
Richard Henderson was the maintainer...

Matt Turner