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: {| class="wikitable !Project !Description
 * Alpha Release Coordinator
 * Development and maintenance of the Gentoo/Alpha LiveCDs, the installation stages and the related development tools (Catalyst and Genkernel). The Release Engineering team crosses architecture boundaries while trying to develop generic multi-architecture and multi-platform release media.
 * Documentation
 * The aim of the Alpha Documentation is to ensure that installation instructions are up to date and offer high quality Gentoo/Alpha docs to our devs and community.
 * Status Reports
 * The Status Reports Project appears to improve communication between Gentoo/Alpha Port and the users community. It tries to be a semestral report where Gentoo/Alpha devs talk about the port progress during last months, on what we are working on and what are the next steps programmed for the future.
 * Hardened
 * The Hardened/Alpha project aims to bring some features of the Hardened project to the Alpha platform. Current efforts are limited to SELinux support and the hardened-sources.
 * Arch Testers
 * The Gentoo/Alpha Arch Tester project is heavily based on the Gentoo/AMD64 Arch Tester Project and the Gentoo/PPC Arch Tester Project. The Project is meant to help the Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team providing an stable, secure and up to date Gentoo Linux port.
 * Hardened
 * The Hardened/Alpha project aims to bring some features of the Hardened project to the Alpha platform. Current efforts are limited to SELinux support and the hardened-sources.
 * Arch Testers
 * The Gentoo/Alpha Arch Tester project is heavily based on the Gentoo/AMD64 Arch Tester Project and the Gentoo/PPC Arch Tester Project. The Project is meant to help the Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team providing an stable, secure and up to date Gentoo Linux port.
 * The Gentoo/Alpha Arch Tester project is heavily based on the Gentoo/AMD64 Arch Tester Project and the Gentoo/PPC Arch Tester Project. The Project is meant to help the Gentoo/Alpha Arch Team providing an stable, secure and up to date Gentoo Linux port.

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.