F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dennis Gilmore" <dennis at ausil.us>
> To: devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> Sent: Friday, July 12, 2013 9:02:48 AM
> Subject: Re: F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture
> 
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> On Thu, 11 Jul 2013 10:23:50 -0700
> Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 07/11/2013 03:55 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > I'm not up-to-date on the current condition of Power: Are you
> > specifically referring to GNOME & KDE?  If so I'd posit that this is
> > because GNOME & KDE make a lot more sense on Power than they do on
> > ARM. Developer energy goes where it's needed & wanted.  Prior to this
> > discussion nobody was lamenting the state of gnome on their low power
> > ARM system.  We're still building them of course- all the GNOME and
> > KDE packages are built, they're just not getting used AFAIK.
> 
> I actually switched my chromebook over to KDE and used it on my
> trimslice quite extensively. during the f19 cycle.
>    
> > > 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.
> > 
> > Are those concerns valid?  By what measure?  Can they be controverted
> > by evidence?  Thus far we have pro and con anecdotes.
> > 
> > > 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.
> 
> i will look at throwing together a script to give us some comparisons
> between the build times on the different arches.


Phew, finally something meaningful :) . I was afraid that the major (at least for me) problem named "make it cost more time for packagers" will be plain ignored.
Can we get a comparison for majority of packages and get some real point that will become too costy for packagers - aka build time of less than 20% of packages should be 5 or more times longer. I personally thing this is pretty low bar but some might argue that it's high so numbers put are just to serve as an example.

Alexander Kurtakov
Red Hat Eclipse team

> 
> > These are good suggestions- thanks for that.
> > 
> > > 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.
> > 
> > Absolutely.  Change is hard, but if all goes well this one will be
> > popular in hindsight :-)
> > 
> 
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