DEC Alpha - How can I help?

Lupin_the_3rd · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2005 Posts: 168

I'm a long time Linux (and UNIX) user but new to Gentoo. I've got two PC164 DEC Alpha systems at home. A 500Mhz w/ 512MB and a 433Mhz w/256MB. I've just installed 2005.0 on the 500Mhz box (running an 'emerge mozilla-firefox' as I type this!). While browsing through the online package database, I see many programs that do not have a stable Alpha build available.

Many of these same programs I have downloaded source code and it has compiled cleanly on my systems. So my question, is how can I contribute to the gentoo package system and provide stable Alpha packages so others can enjoy them?

TIA
_________________
Compaq XP1000 Alpha EV67 667Mhz w/ 2GB ECC
32bit PCI: ATI Radeon 9100 (DRI works!)
32bit PCI: Generic Firewire 400 card
64bit PCI: BCM5703 Gig-E (Compaq NC7771)
64bit PCI: Sil3124 SATA w/ mdadm RAID1 (pair of WD VelociRaptors)

R!tman · Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2005 7:12 pm Post subject:

Great to have people like you :-)

!

I think all architectures use the same ebuild files, as all programs are compiled from source. But there is the possibility to change an ebuild to enable architecture-specific features.
ie, you can say that for x86 a package is compiled the "normal" way and for amd64 a certain patch is applied first.

If you want to know more about ebuilds, look at this.

Getting the working ebuild into portage is another story. You can certainly post them in the forum and upload it to bugs.gentoo.org. Then everybody who is interested can download it into his/her overlay directory.
But how to get it into the official portage tree, this I cannot answer. Maybe a developper can help you here.

griffypoo · n00b Joined: 28 Jan 2005 Posts: 16

There are a number of things that you can do depending on your ability. The first you are already doing: Using gentoo on your alphas and reporting any bugs that you encounter to bugzilla. You can also participate by asking the alpha maintainers add packages to ~alpha. With enough testing, these packages will be given the blessing of being "stable".

You mentioned that you have some background in Linux. If you've done some programming in the past as well, you may be able to help things out by investigating and submitting patches for "unaligned traps". As I am sure you know, these are the bothersome messages that you see in the output of your dmesg that hurt the Alpha's performance.

Welcome to the gentoo community!

Kloeri · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Sep 2002 Posts: 144

Definitely file keyword requests at htt://bugs.gentoo.org

Keyword requests are much appreciated as the alpha devs are not likely to try random software to see if it can be keyworded

I try to process keyword requests as fast as possible.

Patches for various problems are also very welcome.

Lupin_the_3rd · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2005 Posts: 168

Kloeri · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Sep 2002 Posts: 144

By keyword requests I just mean a bug saying packaqe-xyz works on alpha, could you please add ~alpha to KEYWORDS? Or this package works fine on alpha and has been marked ~alpha for a long time, could you please mark it stable on alpha?

Lupin_the_3rd · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2005 Posts: 168

Kloeri · Retired Dev Joined: 02 Sep 2002 Posts: 144

Enhancement is fine although users are generally encouraged to leave severity and priority alone as they are only useful for the developers. Some devs use those fields rigorously while other devs (like me) most often ignore them.

Anyway, thanks for your keyword requests - I'll get to them as soon as possible.