F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 11:04:51PM -0700, Brendan Conoboy wrote:

> 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.

CPUs are an implementation detail. The experience of running Fedora on 
ARM should be as close as possible to that of running Fedora on x86. If 
we're willing to compromise on that, then what do we actually mean by 
"Fedora"? Something that shares a majority of the packages? Well, in 
that case any of the spins would also be Fedora, but we draw a 
distinction between a spin and the general install media.

This isn't some new distinction that I'm pulling out of the air. We've 
always had a strong idea of what Fedora is and a defined marketing 
message that distinguishes between Fedora and something that's 
almost-but-not-quite Fedora. Right now the proposal is for something 
that's almost-but-not-quite Fedora to be treated as if it's Fedora, and 
I don't think that benefits the public perception of the project.

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