On May 13,  6:18pm, dah103@york.ac.uk wrote:
> Subject: Re: it's been a long time, this time...
> > On Tue, 13 May 1997 dah103@york.ac.uk wrote:
> > > >   Basically, the message seems to be wait a week or so!
>
> > > > Ale.
>
> > > Far be it for me to seem pessemistic or anything, but that's what is
> > > always said...
>
> >   But this is the first time that DIGITAL is paying for it. I imagine the
> > question isn't so much wether it'll get done, it's when!
>
> This is true.  It's just that we appeasr to have been waiting for the
> mythical (sorry guys) console code since about Christmas or so.  Ditto the
> EtherH driver (OK, so nuts' leaving the project hasn't helped much), and
> the fabled Cumana NDA isn't your fault, but it does seem a little... I
> don't know... erm, irritating?

Fair enough. I deserve that about the console code I guess. It was a little
harder to do than I expected :( (especially the thinking). At the moment it
looks as if there is no progress on the console because the new console has
less working functionality than the old one (particularly on StrongARM machines
where it currently hangs the machine during boot - hope to get that fixed
before the show). What it does have is a well defined structure and support for
1bpp.

With the formation of Causality Limited a lot of RiscBSD projects got put on
hold because we hideously underestimated the complexity of our first task and
the amount of paperwork involved in setting up a company. RiscBSD is still done
in our spare time plus when people decide to pay us to do things for free
release (cf Cygnus). Compiling up a binary release takes a hideously large
amount of time which we haven't had (hence the lack of new features on the ftp
site).

We were very careful with our Wakefield announcement to only make promises we
felt we could deliver on so we hope that anyone at the show will be pleasantly
surprised.

To be fair we have had a few new drivers written but unless you use one of the
affected cards you are unlikely to have noticed.

> Sorry to rant, but I really, really hope things get better.

They will. I think this time next week is a bit optimistic to hope to see new
stuff on the ftp site (unless some of the drivers have made it into the kernel
sources by then).