RFC: Primary architecture promotion requirements

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 04:37:17PM +0100, Tomas Mraz wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 15:19 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: 
> > 4) All supported platforms must have kernels built from the Fedora 
> > kernel SRPM and enabled by default in the spec file. Each kernel must be 
> > built in a timely manner for every SRPM upload.
> 
> I do not like this requirement. This seems to be specifically provided
> to block the possibility to have ARM as a primary architecture if we do
> not want to support just one or two ARM platforms. I do not really see a
> problem in limiting platforms during rawhide development and branched
> development. Additional platforms could be enabled for final builds
> before the release freezes and for update builds.

The problem with not doing a full set of builds in rawhide is that it 
significantly reduces the testing - both in terms of making sure that 
code still bilds, and in terms of making sure that we don't have 
unexpected functional regressions. Shortly before release is a really 
bad time to discover this. My impression is that the kernel team don't 
want that to be a possibility.

> Another solution might be in koji where the kernels for the additional
> platforms would be built in parallel on multiple build hosts. Of course
> that would require changes in koji.

Yes, there's no fundamental reason that these builds need to occur in 
series. If koji had support for exploding builds out to multiple 
machines then things would work much better. Another alternative might 
be to investigate whether distcc is practical in this environment.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org