Project:Alpha

Project Description
The Gentoo/Alpha Port works to keep Gentoo the most up to date and fastest Alpha distribution available. We are responsible for the maintenance of all Alpha specific meta-data and the testing of all other non Alpha specific meta-data on the Alpha architecture to ensure portability. Portability implies reusable meta-data.

Project Goals
The goal of the Gentoo/Alpha Port is to guarantee that the Alpha packages build using Gentoo meta-data are up to date. By continuously enhancing the meta-data, we provide the Alpha user with the Gentoo community feeling, performance, freedom and up to dateness. The meta-distribution notion allows for a user to to be as bleeding edge as he/she wants:

Gentoo is unique because of its interpretation of the Meta-Distribution notion: all architectures share the same 'generic' meta-data (information about how to build packages - how to build a distribution). The Alpha developers are responsible for building and testing packages using this meta-data. The meta-data gets marked 'tested' or 'stable' afterwards, depending on the building and testing experience. Our users can use (but don't have to use) this information to build a system that suits their needs.

Subprojects
The Gentoo Alpha project has the following subprojects:

How to Participate
Can you make computers do amazing things? Are you excited about exploring areas of computing never explored before? We are continuously looking for volunteers willing to spend some of their free time on this project. In return for your work, you get the respect of the alpha community.

If you are interested in helping, but don't have a niche that you are interested in filling, you can always look through bugs.gentoo.org. There are many many bugs waiting to be found and fixed and many enhancements looking to find someone to code them. Figure out a fix, implement it, test it, and then keep trying to make the patch smaller. Post it for review on bugs.gentoo.org, and keep working on it. If it seems ignored, make a new comment in the bug and/or mention it in #gentoo-alpha.