F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Brendan Conoboy]

On 07/11/2013 07:33 AM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Promotion is supposed to benefit Fedora, not the architecture being
> promoted.

And you think it would not benefit Fedora.

> So promoting ARM comes at a cost to every individual package maintainer,
> who now has to do additional work.

Do you really think individual package maintainers haven't been involved 
to date?  It's flattering to think that our relatively small crew has 
somehow been able to manage every issue that's come up with all 13500+ 
packages, but the truth is that package maintainers are good people who 
already handle many of the ARM issues that come up as source churns. 
The main difference is workflow change.

Today: ARM builds are queued by koji-shadow some period of time after 
they complete successfully on primary.  If a build fails then the 
koji-shadow admin gets notified.  If it's a real bug it gets BZed, we 
work with the package maintainer, the bug is fixed, and we move on.

As primary: ARM builds would be queued at the same time as x86.  If a 
build fails the package maintainer gets notified.  If it's an 
ARM-specific bug the maintainer would get in touch with the ARM team. 
The full details of this change are TBD and should be discussed.

> I agree that that's the ideal case. If package maintainers are willing
> to volunteer their time to ensure their packages work on ARM then
> everything is easier and we all benefit. That doesn't seem to be the
> case yet.

Oh?

> What I'm saying is that making ARM a primary architecture isn't going to
> automatically make volunteers start caring about ARM, and so there
> should be evidence that the existing ARM porters can deal with the worst
> case scenario of supporting an arbitrary set of packages themselves.

Perhaps it's inevitable, but I would like to avoid a reprisal of the 
Richard Dawkins & Wendy Wright debate.  What evidence are you asking for?

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