Hi everyone,
the Eclipse upstream is dropping ppc64 (big endian) support [1] in the next version planned to be released in September after they dropped ppc32 in the previous release. Eclipse is part of the minimal self-hosted buildroot in Fedora, in the Java ecosystem. The whole minimal buildroot consists of 3200+ source rpms, so it's pretty complex. Removing the dependency on eclipse would require a substantial amount of work, with an uncertain result. Because both the Power part of the Alternative Arches team and the Fedora Eclipse team lack the resources for committing to this work, we came to the conclusion that the time to drop ppc64 from Fedora is now, before the Fedora 29 release. And it's not only Eclipse, who is focusing to ppc64le Linux on Power hardware, some projects already did that, like Golang, but here we had the infrastructure to omit it for some architecture. And more will come for sure. So the next step is to open a system-wide change for F-29, where we will make it official.
The Power/PowerPC hardware played always a role in the architecture support, but for some time it has already been possible to obtain non-server HW, that's capable of running little-endian Linux on Power.
[1] https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/cross-project-issues-dev/msg15640.html
With regards,
Dan on behalf of the Alt-Arch team