F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Brendan Conoboy]

On 07/10/2013 09:13 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Fedora is an operating system that supports a range of desktop
> environments, defaulting to the GNOME desktop environment. An OS that
> supports headless servers but not desktop environments might be based on
> Fedora, but it wouldn't be Fedora. As such, it wouldn't be suited to
> being a Fedora PA.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish whether to read 
these messages as high standards or hyperbole.  Maybe your Fedora means 
desktop OS, but my Fedora has more facets than that.  Fedora Primary is 
not some Platonic Form embodied by x86; that would be better described 
as Fedora Fantasy.

The all or nothing element in the above simply serves to discourage 
further contribution and is harming Fedora's growth.  The relentless "I 
don't want ARM to sully the good name of Fedora" is absurd: User for 
user, ARM is considerably more popular than Fedora.  Is your definition 
of "Primary" a sacred idea that is responsible for Fedora's success?  If 
held dear for too long it will be the well known idea responsible for 
its failure.

Please consider the idea that there is a useful middle ground "Primary" 
and "Secondary".

Primary Release/Primary Build system
               |
Primary Build system/Secondary Release
               |
Secondary Build system/Secondary Release


It might be multidimensional:

Primary Desktop---Secondary Desktop
         |               |
Primary Server----Secondary Server


15 months ago:

There were concerns about reliability- we moved to enterprise hardware 
in PHX.

There were concerns about build times, particularly that of the kernel: 
We bought the fastest hardware available, moved to a unified kernel 
architecture and sped up builds many-fold.

There were concerns about kernel and toolchain maintainship: We hired 
and/or tasked kernel, glibc, gcc, and other engineers.

There were concerns about releases being held up: We released F19 Beta 
and GA on the same day as x86.

There were concerns about releng: Releng wrote the new promotion proposal.

There were concerns about QA&Release criteria: We copied most of 
Primary's procedures.

There were concerns about the installer: We're using anaconda and 
standard image creation tooling.

There were concerns about desktop users: All supported platforms that 
have graphical hardware have a desktop.

The list goes on and on.  For any of the above a person can be small and 
pick out tiny details where they aren't satisfied, but if you're one of 
the people who is going to do that, please say the following:

"I object to armv7hl moving to primary because of $DEFECT, but if 
$DEFECT is remedied by $MILESTONE, I will then support the move of 
armv7hl to primary".  You define $DEFECT and $MILESTONE and we can have 
a productive discussion.

At this time I think it is quite reasonable to ask for the build systems 
to be merged.  Whether you call it Primary, Secondary, or some new 
middle-of-the-ground word, it's progress.

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com