Hi! So where are we at with alpha currently?
Xorg-1.5 -------- As some of you know, xorg-1.5 abandoned the "classic" way of interfacing with PCI and AGP cards in favor of using libpciaccess. That, in turn expects support from the kernel in the form of /sys/devices/<bus>/<id>/<func>/resourceN files. Unfortunately, alpha until recently hat no support for those PCI resources (which is partly due to the way alpha IO space is structured and partly due to a crucial extension not being available on old Alphas (older than EV5). As such, we weren't able to keyword or stabilize Xorg-1.5 until recently, when 2.6.30-rc* saw support finally being added. Naturally, packages depending on >=xorg-1.5 had to be held off, too. The -rc kernels are keyworded ~alpha so people can test. So far, -rc3 and rc4 are looking good, so we will keyword xorg and deps soon (I'm aiming for this weekend) and if all goes well, we will have it stable, soon. Note that this will mean that people with EV4-Alphas will *not* be able to use Xorg-1.5 just now. I feel that those machines are so slow that very few will run X11 anyway, if there are Gentoo installations on those to start with. Glibc/Toolchain --------------- Glibc has had a bug for ages (regarding ceil() and friends, bug number 264335) which should really be fixed. Upstream is umm.. their usual selves about it. On top, a patch for fdatasync() (bug 264336) is available which upstream... well, you get it. Workload -------- Currently, the alpha arch team consists of me (the nominal lead) and armin76 who helps a lot with getting stable request answered in a timely manner. Also, we're in the process of recruiting mattst88 as an arch tester. He's currently deep in exam-land at university, so the process is on hold for now. Users/Community --------------- Aside from those on the team and one or two other devs, I've had little to no direct feedback from Gentoo alpha users. I try to write about Alpha regularly on my blog (available on the planet) and I'm easily reachable as Blackb|rd on Freenode (#gentoo-alpha, naturally). I've been toying with the idea of offering something akin to Debians popularity contest tool. Some people are rather uncomfortable with data gathering tools that send stuff to some strangers, so I don't know how well it would work. I list this idea here, since I have just about no idea what actual alpha hardware is used with Gentoo out there. Knowing which packages are actually *used* (instead of just being stabilized for the heck of it) would be nice. Added benefit of that would be that users helping with testing would reduce workload. In essence: we're busy and I'd love to get more feedback what people (both users and devs) think we could do better, or more/less of. Regards, Tobias, who turned 42 in octal today -- The only problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes, trouble shoots back.
