[fedora-arm] Patching aarch64 support into Fedora

[Dennis Gilmore]

On Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:44:16 -0800
Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi everybody,
> 
> Fedora 19 has many of the enablers for native aarch64 in core
> packages such as glibc and gcc.  Many more packages would compile if
> config.guess and config.sub recognized aarch64 as a valid
> architecture, but only the latest version of autoconf knows about
> aarch64.  At last week's fedora-arm meeting we talked about the
> viability of automatically patching such packages.  The outcome of
> that discussion was that we should first identify how many packages
> need such a patch, then decide what to do based on that number.
> 
> Red Hat's Al Stone has written a script which automatically generates 
> patches for each package that needs it (And updates its spec file). 
> After a complete run we can say that ~1850 packages need such a
> patch. The number may be larger, but it is definitely not smaller, as
> his only considers autoconf-using packages.  If another auto
> configuration system is in use by a number of packages it too many
> need updating (cmake?). Now that we have this number, what do we want
> to do?
> 
> I see a few options:
> 
> 1. Do nothing, trip over this issue at least 1850 times during
> bootstrap.
> 
> 2. Mail all package owners asking for action.
> 
> 3. Proven packager commits the patches, package owners take them out 
> once unnecessary.
> 
> 4. Run autoconf during build, incurring wrath of any packager whose 
> package isn't compatible with the latest autoconf.
> 
> 5. Your much more sensible idea goes here.
> 
> What say you?
> 

I say we need the list of packages effected. then we can evaluate how
critical it is that we take action. 

Dennis