[fab] Secondary Arches

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 23:15 -0500, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > Then look at PPC.  How can you expect me to believe that taking an arch
> > that _already_ has storage and ISOs and just dropping that off of
> > fedoraproject.org because the buildsys can now send out shadow builds is
> > progress?
> 
> I think that trying to lump PPC in here has perhaps made the issue a
> little bit more muddled.  So ignore PPC for a minute -- does this not
> start to improve things for arches like sparc?  It's not the whole
> answer, but it's a start.

Yes, it _does_ look like a step in the right direction. In the long
term; when the dust has settled and it actually works.

> For PPC, things are a little bit more complicated and it's really just a
> matter of how much demand the platform is seeing vs the effort required
> to sustain it.  So does it make things less good for ppc?  Definitely.

Very much so. On the other hand, if we revisit the question in time for
FC8 _after_ we test the process by bringing Aurora into the fold, then
it doesn't have to be such a retrograde step for PPC.

> But the impetus isn't the existence of secondary arches and shoving the
> round peg in the square hole.  Instead, it's the fact that the number of
> ppc downloads is very small and the community of people actively testing
> and fixing things is quite small.

Nevertheless, it was my impression that FC6 was the best release we've
done on PowerPC so far -- so much so that when I managed to snatch some
time to work on FC6 before its release I actually ended up doing
Bluetooth stuff rather than anything PPC-specific.

FC7 will be even better, and will have support for a set of new and
interesting hardware.

> If your question is just "why don't the bits end up on fp.org", the
> reason is purely one of "we're not attacking that problem first".  And
> realistically, setting the expectation that we're not going to solve
> that problem in the next six months is a far better thing to do IMHO.

I agree. Although the proposed ArchPolicy is a good idea in principle,
it's going to take time to put it into practice, and there are a
_number_ of things that realistically speaking we just aren't going to
solve in the next six months. So please, let's not hold the FC7/PowerPC
release hostage to those solutions.

-- 
dwmw2