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Date:      Tue, 9 Dec 2003 23:44:14 -0600
From:      Josh Tolbert <hemi@puresimplicity.net>
To:        eqe@cox.net
Cc:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: why support alpha??
Message-ID:  <20031210054413.GA58841@just.puresimplicity.net>
In-Reply-To: <200312092243.02269.eqe@cox.net>
References:  <200312092243.02269.eqe@cox.net>

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On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 10:43:02PM -0500, eqe@cox.net wrote:
> Isn't alpha dead? Why bother supporting them in 5.2 it seems like wasted
> energy. Yes people still use it but for them there is 4.9 which works
> fine. You could better serve the freebsd community by focusing on the
> future of computing like amd64, great dual support, better drivers, etc.
> and most people know this, so why not let alpha die. I personally like
> alpha but it has no future.
> 
> BTW to all the alpha people don't flame me flame compaq and dec for
> selling it to them!!
> 
>  Sign,
>     Eriq lamar

Why support 386/486/586? Intel (AMD, others as well) aren't really doing much
to further those versions of the architecture along, so why bother continuing
to support them? Why bother supporting the lower-end UltraSPARCs, considering
Sun will probably drop support for them a few versions (if not the next
version) of Solaris down the road? Hell, why don't we stop supporting PS/2
peripherals, since the trend for input devices seems to be moving towards USB?

You're going with a slippery-slope type argument. If everyone went with your
train of thought FreeBSD itself would be a lot more limited than it is today.
It would only run on the current platforms that have a future. Are all of your
machines i686 or better?

A lot of people have put a lot of effort in to making the Alpha port of
FreeBSD what it is today. You're doing those that have contributed to the
Alpha port (and FreeBSD in general, cause I'm certain some of the things
written for Alpha have found their way in to the other platforms) an extreme
disservice by saying they are wasting their time keeping up the Alpha port.
People work on what they like to do for FreeBSD. If people want to keep
working on the Alpha port, that's great.

No, there's not a lot of future left for the architecture. The writing is on
the wall, but some would say the same thing for sun4u. However, there's still
lots of Alpha users running FreeBSD (as evidenced by this list) and the
continuing Alpha development for FreeBSD.

If you don't want to do any more Alpha development, don't. Just don't tell
everyone else the work they are doing is basically pointless.

To the rest of the list: sorry, I probably got a bit out-of-line...

Josh
-- 
Josh Tolbert
hemi@puresimplicity.net  ||  http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/



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