RFC: Page size on PPC/PPC64 builders

[Jim Meyering]

David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 09:59 +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:
>> > I'm concerned that switching back to 4KiB pages is just papering over
>> > real bugs to make life easier for PPC folks. I suspect that what I
>> > should _actually_ do is keep it 64KiB, brazen it out and LART people who
>> > just exclude ppc builds without actually looking at the problem for
>> > themselves. But I'm lazy too... maybe we should switch the x86_64
>> > builders to 64KiB instead? :)
>> >
>> > Opinions?
>>
>> I'm surprised there's so much debate.
>> Isn't it obvious?  A service that finds generic bugs -- and ones
>> that would likely be much harder to diagnose in any other context.
>> People will complain no matter what you do, so take the high road:
>>
>> Brazen it out with a LART :-)
>
> The problem is that there is a risk that it'll make the less
> conscientious packagers just think 'oh, building for ppc is painful' and
> exclude that architecture. There's enough of that already, with some
> people even sticking to that line even after the same bug bites them on
> x86_64 too.
>
> That's not _such_ an issue because there are relatively few such
> packagers, and we have the rule that all architecture exclusions _must_
> be filed in bugzilla and we can keep track of them through the
> ExcludeArch tracker bugs.
>
> My _real_ concern is that continuing to use 64KiB pages is likely to
> increase the motivation for people to let PPC builds fail _without_
> aborting the main build on x86/x86_64, so the laziest of packagers don't
> even have to _look_ when their build fails. And then a lot of the
> benefit is lost (or we just start pushing even more of the generic bugs
> onto the arch team and making it really hard for them to keep in sync
> with the development tree properly).

I do see your point.  Tough position.

> Yes, that would be extremely misguided, but I think it's dangerously
> likely to happen and I don't want to make it _more_ likely or accelerate
> it.

However, it sounds like the real problem is the fact that there is enough
of a risk of "people" making PPC build failures non-fatal that you're
considering the long-term-lose(but lose less) compromise.
Either PPC support matters or it doesn't.  If it does, then someone
with authority should be able to put their foot down and say
"Keep the big picture in mind, and do what's right for the project."

Jim
[ who shouldn't be talking, since he knows nothing of Fedora politics ]