[fedora-arm] Linaro toolchains and Fedora

[Jon Masters]

Hi Ricardo, Michael, Marcin, and Brendan,

On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 21:16 -0200, Ricardo Salveti wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Michael Hope <michael.hope at linaro.org> wrote:

> > We don't have a libc as there hasn't been the need.  The cross
> > compiler could either target the Fedora ARM port or the Linaro LEBs.
> 
> I believe it could simply target the Fedora ARM port, but then don't
> know if it'll be easily compatible with other rpm-based distros.

This is a good opportunity to ensure that it is the case :) If there is
diversity at the fundamental level sufficient to break compatibility
between RPM distributions we have a lot more work to do on cross-distro
compatibility (and I want RPM/non-RPM compatibility to be great also).
We would certainly welcome data about how compatible we are today. 

> Well, guess making the Linaro native package available should help you
> understanding if there's any need to do the switch. Even if not
> entirely switching to the Linaro GCC, you could simply make the
> package available for the people to try and help tracking and
> comparing bugs and issues with the native distro GCC.

That is reasonable, us switching to anything other than the official
Fedora GCC is not a reasonable outcome for the Fedora ARM project :) In
my mind, I enjoy that we have GCC maintainers working for Red Hat who
maintain both our commercial and Fedora GCC packages. I welcome and
support the work Linaro are doing, but I think it would not be to the
greater benefit of our distribution to outsource the toolchain itself.

> >>  Once packages are in rpm format it's very straight-forward for anybody to
> >> start using them, pulling updates, etc.
> >
> > I'd have to bring that up with management.  We'll support you if you
> > use it but producing and maintaining the packaging is an overhead.
> 
> This is solved at our LEBs by enabling the packaging recipes at
> Launchpad, that then merges the packaging souce with the Linaro GCC
> trunk and push the package to be automatically built at our PPAs. If
> you have some sort of a similar system, that could trigger new
> packages and rebuilds once the Linaro GCC bzr tree gets updated, I
> believe we can at least help setting up the environment and building
> the first packages.

We do have a capability to have personal packages and our build system
can import sources from various places. Having said that, I do not
believe a fully automated build based on polling your trees is going to
work with the current technology. It would, though, be fairly low
overhead to have a "package" in Fedora that is really just an RPM spec
file and a clone of the Linaro sources you/we can pull into frequently.

> To have proper maintenance and such would then be a quite overhead,
> and would need an agreement with the management.

I'm not convinced we need to have a "product" grade toolchain yet. What
we could start with is just a period sync of the latest Linaro toolchain
into a Fedora ARM package and see what the interest is in developing it.

As to conference calls, I'm flexible on the timing myself.

Thanks,

Jon.