Linux on Alpha...

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 06:25:01PM -0400, David Hummel wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 05:30:14PM -0400, dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:
> > On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 05:21:18PM -0400, David Backeberg wrote:
> > >
> > > In the gentoo case, many things are usable, but are nonetheless
> > > marked experimental. My understanding is that this situation also
> > > applies to much of Debian.  "Stability" seems to take into account
> > > feedback from the users, and since an alpha user group is
> > > drastically smaller than an x86 group, it follows that this cycle
> > > drags out longer.
> > 
> > Debian doesn't work that way.
> 
> Actually, Debian does work that way.
> 
> Packages enter "unstable", and once the number of release-critical bugs
> is minimized, the packages move into "testing".  At some point when
> "testing" becomes mature enough, it is frozen (as "sarge" is now), and
> eventually becomes the "stable" branch.
> 
> The bug reports are submitted by developers as well as users, so these
> reports constitute user feedback.  You could say that user feedback is
> directly related to package migration and the "stability" of packages
> and distributions in Debian.

Nevertheless, Debian doesn't have sendmail 8.4.3.2-pl35 as
stable on x86 and ppc, while having sendmail 8.4.3.0-pl3 as
stable on alpha and arm. (There may be an alpha-specific patch,
but these are few and far between, as most issues can be
generalized and moved up to gcc or libc or some other
infrastructure package.)

-dsr-

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