On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Rankin, SE (Stephen) wrote:

> There is no hurry for a final decision, but the question of Linux
> distributions has been going on for quite a bit, and Starlink have not
> really said a lot about it.

Fine, as I said I don't think the message about what we're offering has
been made clear yet, we're actually being very flexible.

> >We may HAVE one internally but the only way to go is to >say
> >that's it's all tested to reasonable levels on a few popular distributions.
>
> That would probably be a lie though. We can test the build, check thing run,
> but that is about it. Admittedly, there will be very few problems on other
> Linux distributions, but I do not think we can safely say that it is
> perfectly fine on everything.
>
> Hopefully we will be able to say that we have a CVS tag for a stable source
> set, and it will build under the following systems .... But this release is
> not based on the CVS, so they cannot build the software for themselves. When
> the CVS is ready, I want to check it properly, including checks for basic
> things such as missing files from the installation any scripts that get
> modified at installation. The system is new, so we should be very careful.
>
> Just the final stick in the mud, we also have the problem of saying Tru64
> support has been dropped, but here are some more supported Linux
> distributions.

Clearly given the man power available (1 staff year from April?) we cannot
offer "support as they've known it" for all versions of Linux, or for that
matter Tru64, what we are offering is the best we can, some hope of self
help. Linux users are used to this level of "support", report a bug and
see what happens, or patch it up yourself.

Direct any blame to where it belongs, we're doing our best.

Peter.