Summary & minutes for today's FESCo meeting (2012-03-19)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 03:00:39AM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Josh Boyer wrote:
> > It's fairly disappointing this was discussed during this meeting without
> > being on the agenda that was sent out.  This is a rather large item that
> > needs a lot of discussion among the various groups in Fedora, and I'm sure
> > that I'm not the only person that wasn't aware it was even going to be in
> > the meeting today.  (Even ignoring the fact that the agenda was sent
> > without a proper Subject and easily skipped.)
> 
> I think this should also be brought to larger discussion among packagers as 
> a whole. ARM as a primary arch is probably going to slow down our builds by 
> a lot, at least at the beginning. It also means it'd become the maintainer's 
> job to fix ARM-only build failures. I think ARM should NOT become a primary 
> arch, period. Having an actively maintained secondary arch is also the best 
> way to keep improving secondary arch infrastructure with the aim of reducing 
> the delays between primary arch and secondary arch releases, thereby helping 
> all secondary arches, not just ARM (and making them all primary sure 
> wouldn't scale). Changing ARM to a primary arch is the wrong way to get 
> there, and puts an undue burden on Fedora maintainers as a whole, for the 
> benefit of a small niche.

I think ARM is going to be very important, especially if Raspberry Pi
or similar projects take off.

However you are right that (a) ARM is slow and (b) making ARM a
secondary arch without a way for maintainers to *easily* get access to
ARM machines to try out fixes is a quick way to encourage ExcludeArch.

Also there's a whole bunch of wider questions around Fedora on ARM,
beginning with the complete lack of a credible installer.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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