Uoti Urpala <uoti.urp...@pp1.inet.fi> writes:
> Bernhard R. Link wrote:
>> Imagine how long amd64 would have taken, if people had not had years
>> to fix all those 64 bit bugs on alpha first (Which never really got
>> a mainstream architecture and where it was used was quite server-only.
>> Who would have guessed that fixing games to run there would have had
>> benefits in a so soon future?)
>
> I'm not sure exactly how long more AMD64 support would have taken
> without Alpha, but I think it would have become supported reasonably
> fast in any case, and likely with substantially less overall effort than
> by fixing issues as they come up through Debian Alpha builds. "First
> upstream developer of a game gets an AMD64 machine and makes the game
> run on it" is just inherently a lot more efficient than "Debian
> maintainer forwards reports about game not working on Alpha".
> Considering the introduction of AMD64 overall, I think Debian did a
> pretty bad job - avoiding the fuck-ups in the introduction of the
> architecture in Debian would have helped a lot more than the 64-bit
> preparation with Alpha.
Just to give a timeframe here: After compiling the base packages and
build-essentials, setting up a repository on alioth and buildds
compiling the rest of Debian was a breeze. The number of build packages
for amd64 went from <5% to >95% of all packages in 6-8 weeks. The
complete archive rebuild we did after that took 3-4 weeks.
So it took 3-4 people about twice as long as cpu speed and upload
bandwidth dictated to build nearly all of debian and fix amd64 specific
issues. And that was for a verry large part due to alpha having fixed
64bit issues already.
MfG
Goswin
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