future for FBSD on alpha

[Gheorghe Ardelean]

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Wilko Bulte wrote:

> In all reality FreeBSD on Alpha is with one foot in the grave.
> After FreeBSD-6.x goes EOL things are dead.

IIRC by the time the decision was made someone said that it can be brought
back iff developers are stepping in. In my opinion, the big problem with
alpha port was that Andrew left. Hi did a very nice work porting to alphas!

> It would have been better (read: it would have made survivability
> of the Alpha-port a lot better) if people had voiced their interest/support
> a bit earlier..

Yes, but I thing most of the users were happily running their alphas +
FreeBSD. If a thing is working ok than we forget about mailing lists etc.
But this happens also in other projects. IIRC a few years ago it was also
a survey in Debian user community if they should keep the alpha distro.
The watermark was set to ~50 users? Are we 50? Maybe yes, but as Wilko
says the port needs dedicated developers with time etc.

If AMD could manage to sell Athlons and Alphas for the same board (as
planned) maybe we have had a better situation.

Regards,

Gheorghe Ardelean.