Matthew Garrett wrote:
This is very much a draft, but I'd like to start a discussion
regarding
what we expect from primary architectures. Feedback not only welcome,
but actively desired.
So, first of all, I disagree that there should be a process for promoting an
architecture to primary in the first place. The set of primary architectures
(x86_64, i686) should be set in stone unless a MAJOR change in hardware
landscape happens, e.g. x86 gets discontinued by the hardware manufacturers
and everyone uses ARM instead. I don't see that happening any time soon.
Adding primary architectures puts a major burden on all Fedora maintainers.
In the current state of things, I don't see a sufficient demand for making
ARM (or even less any other secondary architecture) a primary architecture.
If ARM is really the future as its proponents claim, we can revisit that in
a few years. Not now.
The focus should be on finding ways to make secondary architecture releases
more timely (i.e. it's not acceptable that e.g. the stable ARM release is
still Fedora 14 which doesn't even get security updates anymore), not to
cheat around the problem by making ARM a primary architecture (which does
not help all the other secondary architectures).
Secondary architectures in Fedora are subject to looser constraints
than
primary architectures for two primary reasons:
1) To make it easier to bootstrap an architecture without the overhead
of the primary architecture release engineering process
2) To avoid primary architecture development being held up by poorly
developed or niche architectures
3) To avoid slowing down all builds by having to wait for the slow builders
to complete them.
4) To avoid build failures caused by platform-specific toolchain bugs or
limitations failing the entire build and forcing the maintainer to fix them.
In order to ensure that these expectations are met, secondary
architectures must meet various criteria before they can be promoted:
1) There must be adequate representation for the architecture on the
Fedora infrastructure and release engineering teams.
2) All builds must occur on Fedora-maintained build servers.
3) Where technically possible, all supported hardware targets must be
supported via Anaconda. Exceptions are limited to highly resource
constrained devices or hardware which provides no means for simultaneous
support of install and target media.
Why would we want to make such an architecture (the "exceptions") primary?!
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.
5) Sufficient developer resources must be available to fix any
architecture-specific issues in such a way that they do not delay
overall Fedora development.
6) It must be possible for maintainers of critical-path hardware
dependent packages to have direct access to supported hardware in order
to rectify any release-blocking issues. For example, X maintainers must
have direct access to any hardware with graphics capabilities.
7) The port must not rely on sourceless binaries unless they fall under
the generic firmware exemption. Where source and toolchain are
available, the binaries must be built in the Fedora build
infrastructure.
This lacks several important requirements:
* The platform should actually have a significant market share. Why would we
want to make an obscure niche device a primary architecture (even if it
fulfills all the 7 requirements you listed)? Your criteria would even allow
architectures to become primary which don't have anywhere near the market
share even ARM has (let alone x86).
* The builders should not take significantly longer to complete builds than
the x86 builders. Otherwise builds (especially chain builds) will be slowed
down by a lot.
* The architecture needs to have sufficient support from the pool of Fedora
maintainers as a whole, who will be on the hook for making their packages
build for it.
* The toolchain (port) needs to have sufficient quality to not cause tons of
platform-specific bugs which are of no fault of the package. (We've had our
fair share of those with ppc/ppc64, due to both bugs and bizarre TOC size
limitations.)
Kevin Kofler