Re: Roles for distributions

[Daniel Jacobowitz <dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Kevin, with due respect, I don't see how you can post something like
this and NOT expect to get flamed hard in return.  I'm going to try not
to, though.

On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 03:52:16PM -0400, Kevin B. Hendricks wrote:
> Why aren't the current PPC linux distributions putting full time developers
> on key projects?

Because no one can afford to.  The PPC linux market, while growing, is
small.  LinuxPPC, Inc. makes what contribution they can, in the form of
supporting existing volunteers; I'm sure some of the other
distributions do the same.

> Why don't SuSE, YellowDogLinux, LinuxPPC, etc have anyone regularly
> contributing to the toolchains (checking builds, reporting and fixing bugs,
> etc)?  We (ppc) should have somebody with commit priviledges on gdb,
> binutils, and glibc 2.2 helping and supporting things (and GeoffK doesn't
> count since he is simply too busy).

It takes a tremendous amount of experience, as I'm sure you're aware,
to contribute usefully to the toolchain.  There aren't very many people
who can do it.  Most of those who can have full time jobs doing it, in
areas that pay their bills - that some of them have the time to do it
volunteer is a miracle.

> And what about the other key projects: mozilla, helix/gnome, KDE, galeon,
> apache, etc?

I wonder why you put apache here... Apache needed almost no fixes for
powerpc; the last batch I recall were glibc 2.1 / db2 related, and
several of us got them fixed about two years ago.

There are volunteers working on all of the above.  No one can afford to
pay anyone to.

> (and I do try to help out with glibc and things when I have time).

And that is all we can ask of anyone.

Dan

/--------------------------------\  /--------------------------------\
|       Daniel Jacobowitz        |__|        SCS Class of 2002       |
|   Debian GNU/Linux Developer    __    Carnegie Mellon University   |
|         dan@debian.org         |  |       dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu      |
\--------------------------------/  \--------------------------------/

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