Feedback on secondary architecute promotion requirements draft

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Wed Apr 4 10:25:54 UTC 2012


On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Peter Robinson wrote:
>> It's already been stated that 3D isn't a blocker for PA, but that the
>> needs to be reasonable GUI support similar to that of the mainline
>> project.
>
> "reasonable GUI support" already includes 3D in GNOME, and with the
> developments in Qt 5, chances are the same will become true in KDE Plasma
> too in a few months.
>
> Now the "reasonable 3D" criterion can in principle be met by llvmpipe, but
> CPU power is not what ARM is strong at.
>
> I think sweeping that issue under the carpet is not going to help. I don't
> think ARM is ready for primary architecture status as long as the upstream
> status of Free OpenGL drivers is what it is now.

I'm not and have never suggested sweeping anything under the carpet, I
and noting what others have said elsewhere in the various threads.
It's clear you don't want ARM as a primary arch and I'm sure you'll
dig out any random package and add it as a blocker to ensure that is a
case. It's up to FESCo to define what they wish, once that has
happened we will work towards ensure we meet that.

>> I agree it's hard to make it exhaustive but ultimately it can't be a
>> moving target with extra items added and the goal posts moved every
>> time it's reached.
>
> Why not, if new issues are discovered which nobody thought of before? Would
> you rather sweep them under the carpet just so that you can stick that
> "primary" label on your work? The overall goal should be to do what's best
> for the Fedora project as a whole, not to promote your architecture as the
> goal in itself.

Nope, never said that. I am, as are the rest of the ARM SIG, sure
there will things that will come up as things move along, this isn't
something that as ever happened before. Our, as in the ARM team, goal
has always been to do what is the best for the Fedora Project as a
whole, the architecture is a dependency of that goal, the goal being
getting Fedora to a wider audience.

>> Of course there are unknown risks, there's also unknown risks every
>> time a core package is bumped, or each time infra/rel-eng change
>> something, but there's benefits to those changes as well. Just like
>> that there are unknown risks and possible issues with promotion of a
>> new architecture but there are also known benefits which is ultimately
>> why we've asked FESCo to create these criteria, different people put
>> different benefits to the criteria but ultimately personally I believe
>> it will be a net gain for Fedora.
>
> But the important question to ask is always: Do the benefits outweigh the
> risks (and the known drawbacks)? If new risks are discovered, they can
> outweigh the benefits.

Absolutely, and that's why it's an open discussion and every
contributor will have different opinions on benefits and risks and
that is why we're a dynamic project and why one particular group in
the project can't dictate what goes on. That is exactly why there are
multiple web servers, mail server and desktops such as KDE rather than
one of each :-)

Peter


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