F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 2:04 AM, Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.

I will note that it is not x86 alone.  If one is simply going by "as
close to the current Fedora experience the current Primary offers",
then the PowerPC secondary arch team is actually ahead of ARM.  I'm
not saying they are a better candidate, but I am pointing out that the
criteria Matthew is alluding to is being met by non-x86 architectures.

> 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

I don't believe that is true.  ARM is useful, I want it to be a
Primary arch, but I fail to see how your middle ground below of having
it be primary in the build system is going to somehow grow Fedora.  I
believe there are concerns that it will place additional burden on
package maintainers (like ppc did before there was a real arch team
for it), and that those concerns are valid.

> 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.

And yet did not include any of that information in your proposal.  I
believe build times have improved.  I also believe that you should
show it in the proposal so that it is clear you are addressing prior
concerns.  I'm appreciate the effort spent to speed up the kernel
build times, but the concern is global.  Show the work done in the
proposal with some simple numbers.

Again, I would like to see ARM as Primary and I believe the ARM team
has done a rather good job.  Promoting anything to Primary has never
been done before, so bear with us as we work through it.

josh