F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Thu Jul 11 05:17:30 UTC 2013


On Wed, 2013-07-10 at 20:12 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> On Jul 10, 2013 6:08 PM, "Brendan Conoboy" <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 07/10/2013 02:25 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >>
> >> No. The release blocking desktops are KDE and GNOME. This is stated
> in
> >> the preamble of all release criteria pages, for lack of anywhere
> better
> >> to state it.
> >
> >
> > If we were only proposing headless ARM servers for primary how would
> these criteria apply?  The changes to the build system would be the
> same with our without these desktops in either case.  Note I'm not
> asking Adam specifically; it's a question for the room.
> >
> I was thinking the same thing earlier.  I think Adamw and jreznik
> would both say that we should modify the release criteria for that.  I
> think mjg is more of the opinion that the fedora distribution means
> that certain things including the default desktop are available and
> that a different target, like headless servers, should be a spin.  I
> believe that he's left open the option to rethink how spins and
> primary arch overlap so that arm with a headless server spin could be
> primary but not called fedora.

I'm not actually advocating either course of action.

What I'm saying is that the release criteria are a thing that tries to
codify what we, as a community, decide we want 'Fedora' to be: the
correct process is that we make that decision, then we ensure the
release criteria reflect it.

My position is that 'we', as in Fedora, should decide whether we want
ARM as a primary arch, with whatever caveats are being produced as a
part of this discussion. If we wind up deciding that ARM should be a
primary arch but we don't require it to have a working GNOME desktop, or
whatever, then that's a perfectly valid decision, and we would then
adjust the release criteria and validation process to reflect that.

It would also be a perfectly valid decision to say 'no, all primary
arches should support a certain core feature set, and GNOME is part of
that'. I'm not specifically advocating for either of those decisions;
just saying that "the release criteria as they currently stand say X, so
ARM must do X" is not a good approach.

> Getting back to the release criteria; if we are moving towards a model
> where a headless server spin was fine as the only product for an arch
> I think we'd need to start looking at release criteria being applied
> more purely to spins.  This might require big changes to how we think
> about validating a release.  

So, that's kinda what Johann's suggesting. As I said, on a purely
'intellectual' level I like the model, but in practice, there is still a
substantial faction out there for which "Fedora" is the GNOME live image
or the default DVD install. I'm always up for process improvements, but
I think on a practical level, whatever we come up with is going to have
to ensure that those things work, as it currently does.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net



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