HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0

[ulrich.ulrich at alumni.ethz.ch]

Hi folks, 

a couple of weeks ago a professional FreeBSD supporter managed to bring my 
PWS500a up to work with 4.11 after many failing attempts by myself. Some of 
you may remember that I posted a few questions about this machine to this 
list. Since then I'm using the machine as server and I'm very happy with it. 

Of course, I regret that the Alpha branch is not continued in FreeBSD 
development because I intend to use this and some other Alpha boxes that I 
plan to buy for many years. I like the Alpha architecture and I got the 
impression that most of the higher level problems like seg-faults in Mozilla 
on Alpha are caused by dirty programming techniques or bugs in the C 
compiler related to 64 Bit addressing. Cleaning up such problems would 
result in better code for the other architectures also. 

Nevertheless: Thank you very much for FreeBSD/Alpha so far! 

Ulrich