Alpha status Dec 2005
=====================

A little report about how the alpha arch team development activities are 
going.

Index:

  - Toolchain and Kernel development
  - Security Bugs
  - SELinux development
  - Modular Xorg on Gentoo/Alpha
  - Experimental java on Gentoo/Alpha
  - Alpha arch testers project
  - Future Alpha project page

Toolchain and Kernel development 
----------------------------------
  
Thanks mainly to Bryan Østergaard (kloeri) and our base herd, the toolchain
and the kernel are in very good health:

  * GCC
  GCC was stabilized few days ago to version 3.4.4. Our next step will be
  trying to get gcc-4 working in the testing branch.
   
  * Kernel
  New kernel alpha keywords reached Portage tree, so the current situation 
  is:

    - 2.4 series: 2.4.30   (stable) -- 2.4.32     (testing)
    - 2.6 series: 2.6.14.2 (stable) -- 2.6.15_rc5 (testing)

  udev and nptl support is working fine on the 2.6 kernel series.

  * C libraries
  glibc-2.3.5 hit the stable branch a few days ago after being more than 
  a month in testing and see no important bugs on it. This version allows 
  us to avoid the critical "Threads defuncts on Alpha" bug (#100259). 
  Everybody without nptl support is encourage to install this version as 
  soon as possible.

  * Binutils
  kloeri is planning on bumping to stable binutils 2.16.1 in the next 
  few days. This way, the whole toolchain will be completely up to date.
  
Security Bugs
-------------

The Alpha arch team is pleased to say that we've managed all security bugs 
within a very reasonable response time. At the moment, no delay on 
marking stable versions when security requires it.

Kudos also, to our security herd and rest of our arch teams for keeping Gentoo
security in a high level.

SELinux development 
-------------------

Stephen Bennett (spb) is currently working on SELinux support for Gentoo/Alpha
and we hope to see a SELinux profile for alpha in the tree as soon as we feel
confident about it.

A little note here to say thanks to Dforge and Virginia Computer Science
Department for maintaining our testing computers and adding  the new boxes 
to support SELinux development. 

Modular Xorg on Gentoo/Alpha
----------------------------

Thanks to our developer Stefaan De Roeck (stefaan) the modular Xorg porting
to alpha is going pretty well. We are still waiting for upstream to fix some
errors before putting the alpha keyword on it:
  - https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4928

Stefaan also has a tinderbox to check modular xorg on alpha:
  - http://tinderbox.anholt.net/tinderbox3/showbuilds.pl?tree=xorg

Experimental java on Gentoo/Alpha
---------------------------------

After some work trying to fix compaq-java (see bug #84306) we are nearly 
sure it is a waste of time trying to make something unsupported upstream 
and obsolete (provide jre/jdk-1.3) work.

After some experiences with SableVM, Thomas Cort (tcort) has been playing with
lastest version of this free alternative to make java work on Alpha. SableVM
seems to work with basic packages so, our plan is to set up an overlay and 
start playing with this.

More info about Thomas' current work:
  - http://mediumbagel.org/java/

Alpha Arch testers Project
--------------------------

Fernando J. Pereda (ferdy) is working these days on setting up our Arch
Testers project which has given very good results on other arch teams 
inside Gentoo (mainly amd64).

For more information, you can read the overview on the amd64 arch 
testers' project page to see what this project is about:
  - http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/tests/index.xml

Future change on the Alpha Project Page
---------------------------------------

We hope to make some changes on our official project page to keep public info
well structured and a bit more updated than it is now. Also starting 
subproject sections with information about arch testers, SELinux and 
java would be good.
  
  - (current page) http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/alpha/

------------------------
Gentoo Alpha Herd
Dec 2005