Re: why support alpha??

On Wednesday 10 December 2003 00:44, you wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 10:43:02PM -0500, eqe_at_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
Yes, you have a point here but I never said alpha hackers are working in vain. 
I merely tryed to imply that their efforts could better serve the freebsd 
community by concentrating our efforts on just platforms that are more 
mainstream in the server market. I personally would stop dev. on anything 
lower than a PII for 5.2. Its not abandonment it's just progress, their are 
greater issues at hand that need attention like smp. Futher more netbsd will 
always support them as well as 4.9. so I don't really see any great loss 
here. I support a lan that has mostly modern equipment but it does have two 
586 on the network. on one of them I have 5.1 running on it just for fun, but 
considering that getting more ram for the system would cost co. more than the 
mashine is worth it is really dead and when anything breaks in it. those 486s 
will see the dumpster w/o question.

 Sign,
    Eriq Lamar