On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 08:41:43PM +0200, Riku Voipio wrote: > So, debian is coming the netbsd of Linuxes.. Sure a novel goal to > support rare hardware, but why does ot have to come at the expense > of commodity hardware owners?
That's an interesting comparison. If you look at NetBSD, you'll see that they have a very similar problem to us: They have a really slow release cycle. I think at some point it really does come down to the size of the OS. At some point, I suspect that the Debian community is going to have to decide what it wants. Will it be frequent, up-to-date releases, or will it be support for every platform we can get our hands on? I don't think we can have both. People will undoubtedly say something to the effect of "well, if somebody's willing to do the work to support some new architecture, we shouldn't discourage them. They're not interfering with our ability to do our work." Is that necessarily true, though? It's been pretty clearly stated that Debian will not release sarge until the new installer is ready. How long will we wait for the various ports to get to an installable state? If we wait indefinitely, that haven't the ports that aren't yet ready interfered with the users and developers of the other ports we support?' I really wonder when debian-installer will be in a releasable state on something like ARM or mipsel or s390. I'm not convinced we will make a release before 2005. (As an aside, yes, I have started investigating porting debian-installer to non-x86 architectures. This is not because I give a flying fuck about them, but because I can't stand the thought that it might take us 2 years to release sarge. Personally, I'd rather drop support (in sarge, not necessarily sid) for archs that aren't installable by some deadline.) noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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