Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 10:53:25 -0600 From: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org> To: alpha@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org Subject: Demotion of alpha to Tier 2 Message-ID: <40CDD805.4030400@freebsd.org>
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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
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