Future HH releases... (now that Familiar .4 is almost ready).

As you all should know, as we announced several months ago, our stated
path is to join forces with the Familiar project.

Given that Familiar .4 is (almost) released, I wanted to give a reminder
of this strategy, and ask a question of the community.

As part of this, we plan to upgrade the skiffs and sharks to a matching
Debian distribution, and build a cross compiler toolchain that matches,
to ease compatibility and building software. Right now, people are
complaining of various compatibility problems (e.g. glibc version
problems) when building software on the skiffs for the hh distribution.
We've started on this work, and hope to have it done in the next week or
two.

There is one remaining question: does there need to be a HH v.22 release
to ease this transition (in particular, with a new glibc to help the
situation)? Remember that building/testing such a release comes out of
our hide, and will slow conversion to Familiar. Or should we go directly
to Familiar .4, and concentrate all our resources on getting a stable
consistent environment?

My personal opinion is that we're better off going directly to Familiar
.4 and saving the effort, but we don't want to completely leave people
high and dry if there are good arguments for a HH v.22 (which would be
the absolutely last release of that line, in any case).

Please let us know (either on the mailing list, or if necessary, in private
mail to me) if we really need to produce a HH v.22.

We also encourage people to shake down the Familiar .4 release, now that
it is in its home stretch.

We particularly like the ipkg packaging system in Familiar, which should
make it much easier for people to exchange prebuilt binaries.
                                - Jim

--
Jim Gettys
Technology and Corporate Development
Compaq Computer Corporation
jg_at_pa.dec.com