Call for PowerPC users

[Douglas Mencken]

Yes, we need to make a call for PowerPC users. We are now like rats in
a sinking vessel. Apple dropped us, and Fedora is goind to drop us too
in F13. We, yes, *WE*, can't let this to happen! What is nedded: to
write a call on some official Fedora page, accessibly to everyone, not
only for developers or maintainers. There's actually no so much choice
for us now: 1) to live on OS X 10.4/10.5 and forget about modern
software or security updates; 2) to migrate on GNU/Linux, where you'll
never be "dropped" regardless of your platform is supported with MS
windows or not.

[Tom Callaway]

On 03/28/2010 05:11 PM, Douglas Mencken wrote:
>  Yes, we need to make a call for PowerPC users. We are now like rats
> in
>  a sinking vessel. Apple dropped us, and Fedora is goind to drop us too
>  in F13. We, yes, *WE*, can't let this to happen! What is nedded: to
>  write a call on some official Fedora page, accessibly to everyone, not
>  only for developers or maintainers. There's actually no so much choice
>  for us now: 1) to live on OS X 10.4/10.5 and forget about modern
>  software or security updates; 2) to migrate on GNU/Linux, where you'll
>  never be "dropped" regardless of your platform is supported with MS
>  windows or not. 
Okay. Take a deep breath. Count to five.

There. Doesn't that feel better? Now, let's talk rationally about this:

Do you care about Fedora PPC support? Do you care enough to help make it
possible?

If the answer to those two questions is yes, then I would strongly
encourage you to get involved with the Fedora PPC Architecture Team.
These are the people who put in the time to build Fedora packages for
PPC, to fix PPC specific bugs, to compose the releases, to test them,
and release them.

The reason that PPC was dropped as a Primary Architecture was because
very few people were doing this work. Many packages were being built but
didn't work, many more were just not building. In addition, these build
failures were preventing otherwise successful builds on x86/x86_64,
which is where the majority of the Fedora userbase is.

It is important to keep in mind that just because Fedora won't
automatically do a PPC release for Fedora 13 and beyond does _NOT_ mean
that there will not be a PPC release for Fedora 13 and beyond. If the
PPC Architecture Team does the work and makes the release, then it will
happen.

For more details, see:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC

~spot

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:27:15AM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> On 03/28/2010 05:11 PM, Douglas Mencken wrote:
> > Yes, we need to make a call for PowerPC users. We are now like rats in
> > a sinking vessel. Apple dropped us, and Fedora is goind to drop us too
> > in F13. We, yes, *WE*, can't let this to happen! What is nedded: to
> > write a call on some official Fedora page, accessibly to everyone, not
> > only for developers or maintainers. There's actually no so much choice
> > for us now: 1) to live on OS X 10.4/10.5 and forget about modern
> > software or security updates; 2) to migrate on GNU/Linux, where you'll
> > never be "dropped" regardless of your platform is supported with MS
> > windows or not.
>
> Okay. Take a deep breath. Count to five.
>
> There. Doesn't that feel better? Now, let's talk rationally about this:
>
> Do you care about Fedora PPC support? Do you care enough to help make it
> possible?
>
> If the answer to those two questions is yes, then I would strongly
> encourage you to get involved with the Fedora PPC Architecture Team.
> These are the people who put in the time to build Fedora packages for
> PPC, to fix PPC specific bugs, to compose the releases, to test them,
> and release them.
>
> The reason that PPC was dropped as a Primary Architecture was because
> very few people were doing this work. Many packages were being built but
> didn't work, many more were just not building. In addition, these build
> failures were preventing otherwise successful builds on x86/x86_64,
> which is where the majority of the Fedora userbase is. 
To be fair, I think that's an exaggeration.  The default install for PPC/PPC64
worked just fine through F12.  I'm running it now.  I think it's true there were
a subset of packages that weren't building, but every package I've installed
has worked just fine.

Neither of us has data here, so we'll just agree to disagree.

> It is important to keep in mind that just because Fedora won't
> automatically do a PPC release for Fedora 13 and beyond does _NOT_ mean
> that there will not be a PPC release for Fedora 13 and beyond. If the
> PPC Architecture Team does the work and makes the release, then it will
> happen.
>
> For more details, see:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC 
That pages is ridiculously out of date.  My fault, but I haven't had time to
update it.

josh