Demotion of alpha to Tier 2

All,

The day has finally come to demote FreeBSD/Alpha to tier-2 status.
While I'm sure that this will come as a disappointment to many, the 
simple truth is that there is no longer enough community interest nor
developer interest to fix critical bugs and assist in the development
of new features.  We've struggled with this for several years, and it's
time to set the proper expectations before we enter 5-STABLE.

Being Tier-2 does not mean that Alpha support will actively be removed
from the tree.  It does, however, mean that ISO images might not be
produced for upcoming releases, pre-compiled packages might not be
produced and more (in fact, this already stopped several weeks
ago), and future security advisories might not be issued for it.  This
only applies to FreeBSD 5.3 and beyond; existing alpha releases are
still supported by the security team according to their schedule, and
future 4.x erratas and releases will still support it also.  Demotion is
also not a terminal condition.  If in the future there is an renewed 
interest and the existing problems can be fixed, it can be re-considered
for tier-1.

Alpha was a very important platform for FreeBSD.  It paved the way both
for 64-bit cleanliness and for being able to support multiple
architectures.  It was also a nice and refreshing architecture in a
world of bland and hackish i386 systems.  Thanks to Doug Rabson for
porting to it in the first place and thanks to everyone who supported it
afterwards.

The Release Engineering Team