F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 02:54:53PM -0400, Jonathan Masters wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > This doesn't make it seem like the ARM port currently has sufficient 
> > developer expertise involved, and I'd really like to hear what the plans 
> > are for (a) fixing the existing problems, and (b) ensuring that we don't 
> > end up in a situation where other architectures are held up because 
> > there's nobody who can fix ARM-specific bugs.
>
> We'll be looking into LLVM in due course. There are a few of us 
> capable of fixing the issue (that you were noted as being extremely 
> concerned about on IRC at the time - we will be happy to send you 
> updates on this) but we balance this with other priorities (as well as 
> a desire not to grow a dependency on LLVM more broadly - Fedora relies 
> heavily upon the expertise of RH's tools team, which focuses on GCC 
> almost exclusively precisely to avoid fragmenting the resources that 
> do exist to develop awesome new tooling). Right now, many desktops 
> work just fine, and there is no reason ARM cannot be a a Primary 
> Architecture because of a temporary bug in llvmpipe (or otherwise we 
> can revive this thread for you next time it breaks on the other 
> architecture and see if it should be demoted accordingly?). If there 
> is a rule saying "PA needs GNOME" then this can easily be adjusted to 
> reflect the fact that many are running Fedora on ARM today happily 
> with a variety of other desktop environments.

There's a few of you capable of fixing the issue, but there were enough 
other things to fix that you didn't have time? That doesn't answer my 
question. What are the plans to ensure that there's enough ARM expertise 
in Fedora to ensure that ARM-specific bugs in critical infrastructure 
packages (like LLVM) don't end up as release blockers?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org