[fedora-arm] Fedora 15 - ARM v5 and v7 plan of attack

[Jon Masters]

Folks,

I've had a few conversations with stakeholders involved in Fedora 15
work, both on IRC, by email, and on the phone. I would like to make a
proposal for our plan of action in the short term.

ARMv7 bootstrap stage4
----------------------

We will continue to build ARMv7 packages in the bootstrap effort. We
will use GA packages as we have done. Those packages that fail to build
with the GA sources will be built using updated sources. KDE and other
stacks on a case-by-case basis will be granted a special exception, and
all of the packages can be pulled from updates. We want to be close to
GA, but we don't want to be unreasonable either. This should resolve
most of the issues around FTBFS and updates issues.

We will hold a review session tomorrow (Thursday September 22) on IRC
that will be announced as a VFAD. At that time, we will review the
release criteria for primary arch and the conventions of secondaries
(for example "don't care about desktop use") with respect to the current
list of failing packages. We will decide what we need to do to complete
the bootstrap in mock of ARMv7, so that we can move on to Koji.

TARGET: October 14th or sooner for remaining packages/ready for Koji.

ARMv5 F15 bootstrap
-------------------

Chris Tyler and the team at Seneca are going to throw dozens of builders
at building the world of F15 v5 packages, using a similar approach to
that done for v7 bootstrap. They only need to do the mock stage4, and
will leverage all of the fixes and other work done so far. It is
expected that they will be ready with a v5 build mid-October. We'll all
pitch in and help, of course. We'll create an F14 based rootfs that can
be used for that "stage4"-like build effort on builders not doing v7.

TARGET: October 14th or sooner for the set of v5 packages.

Koji integration
----------------

We will pull both sets of (matching) v7 and v5 packages into a Koji
instance hosted at Seneca. A mass rebuild with both sets of builders
will be initiated by October 21st with a goal of being complete prior to
Fedora 16 GA. We will work together to make sure Koji is ready to do
this by establishing a test v5/v7 instance as soon as possible.

TARGET: October 21st or sooner for mass rebuild.

F15 release
-----------

I believe our goal should be to have an F15 alpha soon after F16 is
released on or around Nov. 1. If we pull off the above, we should be
able to get an alpha done before mid-November and then begin to turn our
attention to getting F16 on track with a unified Koji, etc. We can also
revisit koji-shadow tracking of rawhide, and so on.

Fallback
--------

We will monitor the Koji situation. If there are going to be unforeseen
delays in this approach, we will fall back to separate Koji instances
for v5 and v7. The official Seneca instance running v5 will be the
official Fedora 15 ARM release. A separate instance will be established
for v7 builds and we will make a test release for v7. We will then seek
to integrate fully for F16 from the outset. We need to be mindful that
Fedora 16 is to hit GA on November 1 (likely slipping a week though). We
should not delay so much that we continue to be behind at that time.

Process
-------

It is clear that we need some more process in place around the Fedora
ARM effort. Thus far, it has been loosely organized on IRC, email, and
in occasional calls between Chris and myself. I propose we soon
establish weekly phone calls on my dialin (details to follow). At that
time we will itemize what the outstanding tasks are, and determine the
best course of action for the current release, next release, longer term
goals around primary architecture integration, and overall process. It
is important that everyone have a voice, and this is a fairer model.

Thanks for reading.

Jon.