[fedora-arm] Agreed linker path changes still not in Fedora

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Steve,

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 5:51 PM, Steve McIntyre
<steve.mcintyre at linaro.org> wrote:
> I've seen the log from [1] and I'm disappointed, to say the least. We
> made an agreement about this several weeks ago [2] in a conference
> call. Various of the people on the call claimed to be Red Hat / Fedora
> ARM and toolchain folks who were both interested in working out a
> reasonable answer to the linker path debate and empowered to implement
> whatever was agreed. We had a productive discussion and quickly came
> to an amicable agreement.
>
> Since then, distros have done the work necessary to use the linker
> path that was agreed, making changes in gcc and glibc packages. Some
> people went with the initial patches that were proposed for the sake
> of urgency, e.g. Ubuntu built using these initial patches for their
> 12.04 release. Given the all-party agreement on the meat of the
> problem (the linker path itself), the finer details of the final
> patches didn't matter so much. Others (Fedora) wanted to wait for the
> patches to be accepted upstream before accepting them. That's also
> understandable and reasonable. However, those patches have been
> upstream for several weeks now and it seems nobody has cared enough to
> pull them into Fedora yet.

That's not entirely true, they have been pulled in but we also have a
release process. They will be in Fedora 18 with likely a full rebuild
to match.

> To dispel a few misundestandings in the log:
>
>  * Ubuntu have *already* shipped the linker path changes in 12.04,
>   their latest LTS release

Yes, we know the details from [1]

>  * Debian and openSUSE are well on the way to releasing with these
>   changes

Sort of. OpenSUSE are "shooting for a 12.2 release for armv7hl, but no
promises yet :)" [2]

Debian while I'm sure it's integrated I'm not sure of the release date.

>  * The change is *not* just a symlink. There are *3* changes needed:
>
>   + move/link the linker so that binaries built against the (agreed)
>     standard linker path will work (so that binaries will work on
>     your system)
>
>   + change gcc's configuration to use the new (agreed) standard path
>     by default, so that binaries built *on* your system will work
>     elsewhere too
>
>   + tweak glibc so that it will accept both the old and new soname
>     for the dynamic linker, so that both old and new programs will
>     work (saving the need for a complete rebuild of the distro before
>     release)
>
> *Every* major distro working on ARM has implemented what was agreed by
> all of us in the conf call. Except Fedora. At this point, the message
> *seems* to be that Fedora developers just do not care about working
> with the rest of the community, and that's a real shame. Please, let's
> work together to get this fixed.

There is no "except Fedora" here. To quote your own minutes [3]
"Fedora; they're planning to do it Real Soon Now." from the meeting,
I'm not sure what was said in the meeting regarding releases but this
was something I personally didn't want to ship 5 minutes before we put
a major release out. That said it will most definitely be in Fedora
18, some of it has already landed and the rest will be very soon and
quite possibly rolled back into F-17 once its been tested.

In all likely hood we'll support this in a stable release before both
Debian (I couldn't work out their next stable release date from their
site) and possible even OpenSUSE depending on if it makes the 12.2
release.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what was said on the conference call but we're
not backing out of the "Agreed linker path changes" and they will be
testable very soon now.

Peter

> [1] http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2012-06-06/fedora-meeting-1.2012-06-06-20.00.log.html
> [2] https://wiki.linaro.org/OfficeofCTO/HardFloat/LinkerPathCallApr2012

[1] http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/cross-distro/2012-April/000261.html
[2] http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/cross-distro/2012-June/000307.html
[3] http://lists.linaro.org/pipermail/cross-distro/2012-June/000305.html