HEADS UP! KSE needs more attention

[Scott Long]

Marcel Moolenaar wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 02:31:56PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> 
> 
>>As with Alpha,
>>the fate of a platform rests on the people who are willing to work on
>>it, not on whether it is in a particular list.
> 
> 
> Agreed, but it's the projects responsibility to take the tierness and
> the intend to support multiple platforms serious and not to chicken out
> at the first signs of complications or hurdles. We labeled sparc64 as
> a tier 1 platform and we better deal with the consequences.
> 
> As for alpha, we don't even seem to be able to degrade it to tier 2
> without losing face. kris@ has already stopped package builds for it
> for his own sake.
> 
> Wake up, people. This is quickly becoming a joke...
> 

It's not that there is face to loose on alpha, it's that every time
I announce that alpha is going to be killed unless issues X, Y, and Z
are fixed, someone comes along and fixes X, part of Y, and promises
to fix Z.  There is nothing wrong with this, and I definitely appreciate
it when people step up to fix things.  However, it does prolong the
process and doesn't leave us with 100% of what we need.

At this point, I'm going to advocate that Alpha be dropped from Tier-1
status for 5.3 and 5-STABLE and no longer be a blocking item for
releases.  I made it very clear last winter that alpha needed a full
time maintainer in order to stay viable, and that really never happened.
As I said back then, demotion is not a terminal condition, and I would
be thrilled if someone comes forward in the future and brings the
platform back up to date.

If anyone wants to claim it now and keep it alive for 5.3, they need to
both finish KSE, make KSE work reliably, and be very responsive to
Kris Kenneway about ports issues.  This needs to happen in no  more
than 4 weeks.  After that, I will turn away even the best of intentions.

Anyways, moving on, KSE needs attention.  Please figure out what can be
done for sparc64 and amd64 and do it.

Scott