Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 17:08:33 +0200 From: Wilko Bulte <wb@freebie.xs4all.nl> To: Dieter <freebsd@sopwith.solgatos.com> Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: future for FBSD on alpha Message-ID: <20080801150833.GE1356@freebie.xs4all.nl> In-Reply-To: <200808010530.FAA22725@sopwith.solgatos.com> References: <20080731221015.GA35293@mech-cluster238.men.bris.ac.uk> <200808010530.FAA22725@sopwith.solgatos.com>
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Quoting Dieter, who wrote on Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:30:01PM +0100 .. > > I wonder how many people run FBSD on alpha. > > According to bsdstats.org very few - less than 5 boxes. > > There must be more. > > There are lots of BSD machines that bsdstats.org doesn't > know about. Indeed. > > like myself, are keen to see FBSD supported on alpha > > for say 1-3 more years. If yes, we might be able to lobby > > ports maintainers not to drop support for alpha ports. > > I might be interested in switching from Net to Free, but if > support is going away that would be a bad idea. 1-3 years In all reality FreeBSD on Alpha is with one foot in the grave. After FreeBSD-6.x goes EOL things are dead. 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.. Regardless, it is water under the bridge now. > isn't very long. This is part of a larger problem. NetBSD > is also dropping support for arches. People don't want to > support things like uucp or usenet any more. Anything more > than 5 nanoseconds old just isn't considered cool. Even if > the replacements are far worse, which is often the case. > What are we supposed to do with older boxes? Some applications > that don't require the latest fast hardware, like firewalls, > still require support and security fixes. Throwing machines > into the landfill isn't very green. True. On the other hand, the power consumption of the average / current Alpha is not exactly green either. I am not running mine regularly, only when I build releases/snapshots. -- Wilko Bulte wilko@FreeBSD.org
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