Fedora Board Recap 2008-FEB-19

[Bill Nottingham]

Doug Chapman (doug.chapman at hp.com) said: 
> The rawhide builds of ia64 stopped just before the F7 release when
> builds were moved outside of Red Hat.  This was before I was closely
> involved in Fedora other than doing testing on nightly builds just to
> make sure things remained stable upstream (my primary focus is RHEL).  I
> was never aware that the builds were going away until I just noticed
> they were not there.  I was told at that time it would be back in a
> matter of weeks (this was nearly a year ago).

I'm sorry you got misinformation, but that was completely inaccurate.

> We are quickly running out of time to get things stable in time for
> RHEL6 which is my major concern and I imagine is a concern of the Red
> Hat members of the Fedora Board.
> 
> My current focus is nearly 100% devoted to fedora-ia64.  We have made
> excellent progress in getting back to where we were when builds stopped
> but it is difficult to collaborate without having a good way to
> distribute builds.
> 
> I do understand the comments made by Bill and Josh in the previous mails
> are not suggesting we shouldn't do secondary arches and I don't think
> they are trying blow us off.  However, things like this often end up
> getting pushed off for long periods of time (and we have had enough of
> those already).

So, let's look at it from a different perspective, putting my Fedora
hat on.

Supporting Fedora on any particular arch is *hard*. It requires resources,
both physical (to have build machines and store the output) and virtual
(time to do it, people to regress failures, testing, etc.)  If it was easy,
Fedora would do it already for all the arches in existence. Since it
is hard, we only do it (as part of the Fedora set of resources) for the
arches where we see the most benefit.

For other arches, I can't see how it's not fair to have them provide
those resources (people, storage, machines, etc.)

Furthermore, you state very clearly:
- you only tested Fedora before as sort of a nightly smoke test
- your major concern is RHEL 6

Given that, I'm not sure why Fedora should care about hosting Fedora
for ia64, if it's not intended to be an actual destination release for
people to use. 

Bill