[fedora-arm] ExcludeArch tracker doesn't appear to be effective

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 7:12 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> On 06/12/2014 12:03 AM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 11:29:41PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, I was entirely unaware of that, and it does change things. Thanks
>>> for letting me know. I'll look into whether it's practical to generate a
>>> list of all the existing ExcludeArch packages and automatically check
>>> whether they have tracker bugs filed - does that seem helpful? It
>>> *would* be good to have meaningful metrics on this, but I don't want
>>> there to be excessive process overhead.
>>
>>
>> I pulled git and have the following for ExclusiveArch: %{arm}:
>>
>> gda
>> Agda-stdlib
>> amplab-tachyon
>> avgtime
>> avogadro
>> avro
>> clpeak
>> compat-gcc-32
>> compat-gcc-34
>> cqrlog
>> derelict
>> dustmite
>> dyninst
>> elk
>> floppy-support
>> ghc-ForSyDe
>> gl3n
>> glusterfs-hadoop
>> grub2
>> grub-customizer
>> gtkd
>> hadoop
>> hbase
>> hfsplus-tools
>> hive
>> hledger
>> jogl
>> joystick-support
>> keepass
>> ldc
>> liveusb-creator
>> Macaulay2
>> mcollective-qpid-plugin
>> numactl
>> numad
>> numatop
>> nwchem
>> ocaml-cil
>> ocaml-gsl
>> patchelf
>> perftest
>> perl-Alien-ROOT
>> perl-qpid
>> perl-SOOT
>> pig
>> pure
>> pure-glpk
>> pyode
>> qt-creator
>> root
>> rootplot
>> sbt
>> scilab
>> seamonkey
>> solr
>> sparkleshare
>> sys_basher
>> tango
>> urjtag
>> wine-mono
>> zfs-fuse
>>
>>
>> That's 60. In addition, the following packages are ExclusiveArch: in
>> such a way that ARM is left out but PPC support is claimed:
>>
>> gprolog
>> mono-bouncycastle
>> nant
>> pvs-sbcl
>> xsupplicant
>>
>> for a total of 65. Of those:
>>
>> compat-gcc32
>> compat-gcc34
>> floppy-support
>> grub
>> grub-customizer
>> joystick-support
>> liveusb-creator
>> numactl
>> numad
>> numatop
>>
>> seem entirely legitimate. That's 55 packages, several of which can be
>> blamed on a small number of missing dependencies.
>>
>> That's git master. In F20 the number is about the same, which I'm going
>> to assume means that there were some fixes and around the same number of
>> excludes added.
>>
>> (This ignores packages that are ExclusiveArch: %ix86 x86_64 because
>> that's probably unfair - if the maintainer genuinely believes that it
>> makes sense for the package to be x86 only then that's fair)
>
>
> Things have probably changed dramatically since I last looked at this
> extensively (with ARM becoming primary), but back then were about 40
> packages in EL6 that build OK on ARM (in some cases with easily available
> additional patches) even though the spec file lists them as exclusive to
> x86. I know this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, some of the said
> packages are not applicable on ARM (e.g. mcrocode_ctl and mcelog) and is
> rather out of date, but the data point suggests that arch exclusivity to x86
> might not in all cases necessarily be as authoritative as implied, and some
> may well build OK on ARM regardless.

EL-6 is totally irrelevant because it's not Fedora, and also it's got
a massively reduced package set, doesn't support ARMv7 hard float, and
is derived from Fedora -12/13 and not Fedora 21 which is what is being
discussed here.

Peter