For a little background, yesterday we had a very long discussion of a
bug[1] during the blocker bug meeting. The quick overview of that bug is
that Firefox failed to build on some non-x86 architectures, so the
package maintainer opted to stop building Firefox on anything but i686
and x86_64. This had the cascading effect of causing the alternative
architecture composes to fail (including ARM/XFCE).

During that meeting, I argued that the specific firefox bug didn't
violate any criteria and that we should create a new bug[2] and mark
that one as a blocker. However, I think I argued my contradicting
example a bit too well and it was misconstrued that I was suggesting
that we drop Firefox on alternative architectures and call that a
solution. My point was mostly that I wanted us blocking on a bug that
described the failed criteria, not dictating a specific solution.

I went digging through the criteria to try to find something that I
could cite to get the Firefox issue back onto the blocker list (because
on reflection *do* think it's extremely serious and I've considered
taking it to FESCo for their override). However, it seems that our
blocker criteria do not describe one institutional guideline that we've
been trying to follow: that alternative architectures should be
delivering the same content as the "primary" architectures.

What I would like to propose (wordsmithing welcome) is an addendum to
the Beta criteria under the Installer->Default Package Set requirements:

"The default package set installed from blocking media must be the same
on all architectures for that Edition, Spin or netinstall except for
packages whose sole purpose is hardware enablement for one or more
architectures."

Breaking it down, I think we should have an explicit criterion that
installing the default package set for e.g. XFCE spin on armv7 must be
the same set of packages you would get in a default install of e.g. XFCE
spin on x86_64. If there are specific examples of where there are known
(non-hardware-enablement) packages for which this is impossible, I'd
suggest adding a clause like "FESCo will maintain a list of packages
exempt from this requirement".

So I'd like for us to consider including this requirement for F26 Beta
(though I realize time is a little short on that score). If Fedora QA
feels that it's too late for us to add this criterion, I'll take the
specific matter of the Firefox builds to FESCo. I do think we should set
a precedent here and document it for the future.



[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1443938
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1448923