Why not continue with Nekoware?

[Knezzen]

I know that Nekochan is now long gone and it feels terribly far fetched to ever see it live again, but why not continue on the Nekoware legacy and port software within the Nekoware environment so to say? There's plenty of stuff ported already, so why start all over again with irisware? Especially since we're not terribly many here (yet).

I don't mean to be negative or bash a very good initiative (the continuation of porting software to IRIX), I just want to bring this issue to light so to say.

[dexter1]

Nekoware had issues concerning quality testing of the software, lack of consistency in packaging, a broad range of development environment people are using and that it left out mips3 systems.
Also, back at Nekochan we weren't allowed to distribute MIPSPro development tools on the forum, so taking part in development basically means you had to warez the tools or ebay them.

So the team here has decided on a different approach where buildscripts are now used combined with the fact that development tools are now online and can be downloaded and used by everyone.

I am still building Nekoware my way with mips3 support (see signature), but it's a slow progress. I do intend to share patches for difficult builds with irisware and will contribute to that as well.

[Raion]

Most of the maintainers of old packages are no longer around, for one thing.

Additionally, the distribution ended up picking up a lot of baggage and has a ton of baked in issues.

Much of the packages in Nekoware are so horribly broken that they don't meet the quality standards and I don't want to waste people's time on it. There were also a number of retarded decisions that were baked into the distribution, such as the path names and prefixes.

We have to start fresh. I already have people who are building things like ansible scripts for IRIX, and I'm experimenting with the best way to bootstrap the system from nothing.

The reason we're targeting a smaller number of packages is to ensure that we always have sufficient staff to keep it maintained. Nekoware was spread too thinly.

[Knezzen]

Great answers guys. Will surely contribute as soon as I get my new Fuel going with MIPSPro