[fedora-arm] FYI: New OCaml ARM code generator

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 03:37:31PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> It won't build in koji-shadow until it's at least built and tagged
> into either f18 or f-17 updates-testing or stable. So you get things
> built and once it starts to filter through I can give you failures.

OK, but this is very indirect.  There are long chains of dependencies
in the OCaml packages, and it will take forever if I can't build
directly for ARM.  The process (for each layer of dependency) will be
something like:

(1) Do scratch builds for ARM until the build(s) works.

(2) Submit a build to Rawhide/x86 and/or F17/x86.

(2a) [After waiting for the x86 build ...] submit an update to F17/x86.

(3) Wait some undetermined time for koji-shadow to do something and to
get feedback from you as to whether the ARM build succeeded.

(4) Go back to (1).

I don't doubt that koji-shadow is great for the bulk of builds that
had to be done to get ARM going, but as I say it's very indirect where
a maintainer is interested in fixing specific packages for ARM.

I know koji-shadow handles dependencies, but looking at the code I'm
not convinced it's going to be safe to build OCaml packages with the
new compiler until I've tested each one, and we mustn't let old+new
code to be combined (how to express that in RPM deps? not sure it's easy).

Rich.

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