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

[Andrew Haley]

Hi,

On 06/09/2012 12:24 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:

>>>> *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.
>>
>> There was urgency in the agreement - we all agreed that there
>> should *not* be any distro releases of ARM hard-float using the
>> wrong linker path.  The Ubuntu developers managed to make the minor
>> changes needed and QA them in 2 weeks before they released. Fedora
>> are taking *much* longer to implement those same changes, which is
>> really frustrating.
> 
> So if it was agreed that there should *not* be any distro release
> without the changes I don't see such an important decision minuted in
> the meeting [1] or discussed in the cross-distro thread. In fact it's
> documented that Mentor would be releasing without it and that the
> Ubuntu release would have some things correct but not all tools would
> be converted.

I was at that meeting, and I don't think that anyone on the call knew
(or at least they didn't mention) that the soname would change, which
requires either a mass rebuild or a weird hack in ld.so:

On 04/18/2012 01:35 PM, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> And there's a slight wrinkle we've found (of course). The change of
> the filename equates to a change of soname for the linker too. Adam
> found this a couple of days back when doing rebuilds of the glibc and
> toolchain packages in Ubuntu, and between us we've come up with a
> (hacky, ugly, *never* to be upstreamed) solution. It seems to work
> fine for us, to at least allow for supporting old binaries until
> packages are all rebuilt to use the new linker path/soname. Just
> talking to Andreas, the openSUSE folks are running with this too.

On 06/09/2012 12:24 AM, Peter Robinson wrote:
> Fedora 17 has a policy for our secondary architectures that is long
> documented [2] for diversion from Primary architectures as well as a
> widely known policy for tracking upstream [3] which was discussed very
> recently with regards to the issues we've had with mainline kernels on
> the cross-distro list. The published schedule [4] for Fedora 17 had
> the main feature deadline as 20th March. The thread you started on
> this list only stated on 31st March with upstream gcc commits on 26th
> April and the upstream glibc commits didn't happen until 8th May [8]
> and even on 24th May there was still ongoing discussions.

That's right.  It wasn't possible to make the change in the time
available.  If it had been just a matter of adding a compat symlink,
as was suggested at the meeting, it would have been possible.

> I think the thing you're missing here when comparing the Fedora
> release to Ububtu 12.04 is that Fedora isn't a long term release the
> next release will be in 6 months which is similar time frames to most
> of the other hardfp releases. If it's open source being developed on
> F-17 ARM it can be recompiled to fix the linker standardisation
> problem, and commercial vendors should be well aware of the Fedora
> release schedule and it's guarantee of stability especially on what is
> currently a secondary arch. Fedora is not RHEL.

Precisely.  I don't think this is such a huge deal because Fedora is a
very time-limited distro.  We knew that the changes would get in on a
best-effort basis.  All that we have now is a six-month hiatus until
F18: unfortunate, but the dates just didn't work.

Andrew.