[gentoo-alpha] Gentoo/Alpha status report 2007

[Jose Luis Rivero (YosWinK)]

Note: this doc can be found on the web at the following URLs... 
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20060621.xml (HTML)
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/status-20060621.txt 
(plain text)

Gentoo/Alpha Status Report
===========================

1. Status reports
------------------

Preliminaries

This is the status of the Gentoo/Alpha porting team. It will be posted
regularly, but not with a static frequency. All questions can be posted
to gentoo-alpha@g.o. The Gentoo/Alpha porting team, has its own
project page (just like almost all other Gentoo projects). You can find
it at http://alpha.gentoo.org/. Also you can contact us via IRC at
#gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net. The latest status report can always
be found on the Gentoo Linux Alpha Status Reports[1] subproject page.

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/status/index.xml

Index

This status report will briefly discuss the following tasks, objectives,
and/or projects related to the Gentoo/Alpha porting team:

   * Developers
   * Toolchain status
   * New revision of aboot
   * Keywording and Security
   * Firefox and Thunderbird fixed
   * Alpha Arch Testers Project
   * Donations

2. Content
==========

Developers
-----------

Since the last status report, some of our developers have gone and some 
others
have joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting project.

Developers who left the Alpha Team:

     - Bryan Østergaard
         Our leader left Gentoo some time ago. He was one of the oldest
        alpha Gentoo developers and one of the main contributors to the
        port. We wish him the best.

     - Thomas Cort
       Thomas was one of our most active developers but, had to stop his
       contributions due to lack of time. We hope to have him with us
       again some time in the future.

New developers, arch testers and contributors:

      - Raúl Porcel (Gentoo developer)
        Raúl joined the Gentoo/Alpha porting team to help with keywording
        and security bugs.

      - Brian Evans (Gentoo/Alpha arch tester)
        Brian joined our arch tester program in . He is helping with
        keywording and bug fixing.

      - Tobias Klausmann (Gentoo/Alpha arch tester)
        Tobias is our last addition to the team. He is also the admin
        of our main dev box.

Toolchain and Kernel development
--------------------------------

     - GCC
     GCC 4.1.2 is our stable version which seems to not have any problem.
     Testing with gcc-4.2 is going fine so probably will enter into
     ~alpha some time soon.

     - Kernel
     Gentoo/Alpha changed the supported sources and now, we are happy to
     announce that gentoo-sources are our default kernel sources.
     Gentoo/Alpha current stable version is 2.6.21.

     - C libraries
     glibc-2.5 is the stable version since February. There was a known
     compiling error related to CFI in sigsuspend files. The error was
     fixed by bumping binutils version during these last weeks. The
     testing with glibc-2.6 goes just fine and it will enter in ~alpha
      sometime soon.

     - Binutils
     Gentoo/Alpha is now using an advanced version of binutils due to
     fails with stable glibc and a bug which makes ld takes too much
     time with some packages. 2.17.50.0.16 is the stable version after
     a heavy testing process.

New revision of aboot
----------------------

Due to some changes in the way the kernel headers allow to use the
types declaration (knowing by "sanitized headers") aboot was not able
to compile against kernel headers >=2.6.19.

Aboot uses a lot of kernel structure definitions so the only quick fix
available was to use the old headers during the building process. Mike
Frysinger was kindly enough to provide a revision of the latest aboot
version and now we have a shiny: aboot-1.0_pre20040408-r1 marked as
~alpha.

Keywording and Security
-----------------------

The keywording process has suffer a major improvement thanks mainly
to the work of armin76 and our arch testers. xorg-7.2, gnome-2.16
and kde-3.5 are stables on alpha as well as latest versions for
all desktop packages.

We also keep the status of security supporting arch attending all
the security bugs managed by the Gentoo Security team with a very
good response time.

Firefox and Thunderbird fixed
-----------------------------

In the previous status report, firefox and thunderbird 1.5 series were 
broken
on alpha. Currently, the situation has changed and now, the latest versions
of these mozilla products are keyworded for alpha.


Alpha Arch Testers Project
---------------------------

The Alpha Arch Testers Project was recently created by Fernando J.
Pereda (ferdy). The project is meant to help the Alpha Arch Team provide
a stable, secure and up to date Gentoo Linux port by allowing users to
participate in the testing and stabilization process. If you want to
learn more about this excellent opportunity to give back to Gentoo,
please check out the Alpha Arch Testers Project Page[2].

[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/AT/index.xml

Donations
----------

Hardware donations are always welcome. We will gladly accept spare alpha
hardware. We are specially looking for desktops systems which aren't too
big to keep them in a house. That's because we lack the resources to
test some software which needs to have physical contact with the box
(cd-writers, sound, bootloaders, kernels, etc.).

More powerful systems could be used to
assist in testing packages, to provide developers with access to alpha
hardware to port applications, or to assist in building releases. Alpha
computers aren't the only hardware that we could benifit from; a SCSI or
IDE DVD burner would allow us to test dvdrtools, PCI 802.11 NICs would
allow us to do more extensive testing and unmask the wifi USE flag
(currently only 1 dev has an alpha with wireless), PDAs would allow us
to test PDA applications and unmask the pda USE flag. If you would like
to make a donation, please drop by #gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net or
#gentoo-alpha on irc.freenode.net or send an e-mail to alpha@g.o.

-- 
Jose Luis Rivero [yoswink@g.o]
Gentoo/Doc Gentoo/Alpha
-- 
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