RFC: Primary architecture promotion requirements

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 13:50 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> said:
> > Indeed, targeting mobile devices on day 1 is beyond the scope of the 
> > proposal.  The first step is the eat-our-own-dogfood target, which is 
> > self-hosting ARM servers.  Mobile devices are a natural direction for 
> > Fedora ARM, of course, but as with every new direction there are a 
> > different set of challenges to be worked through.  For now we're just 
> > talking about the core OS.
> 
> Okay, but how many ARM servers are in widespread use?  For the resources
> required as a primary arch, there should be a large expected user base.
> The first sentence of the detailed description on the feature page is
> "ARM processors are the most popular CPUs in the world." but that is
> entirely irrelevant if you aren't targeting a significant number of
> those CPUs.

...yet, is the word you're missing, which changes things quite a bit.
What the ARM project is currently targeting is what Brendan referred to
as the 'core OS' - making Fedora run on ARM. Any ARM.

It just _happens_ that making the 'core OS' work gives you a reasonable
chance at making, say, a basic web server fly than it does making a
multitouch desktop operating system fly. So it kind of 'looks' right now
like Fedora ARM is more for a web server than it is for a multitouch
desktop OS. But that's kind of misleading. The fact is that the 'core
OS' needs to be there for both, so working on the 'core OS' is really
working on both use cases. It just happens to be the case that one of
the two use cases looks pretty viable almost as soon as the 'core OS' is
done, and the other doesn't. The project is still, in the end, working
on both.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net