[fedora-arm] ExcludeArch tracker doesn't appear to be effective

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Of the ones I know about ...

> avgtime

Written in the 'D' language which doesn't have support for ARM upstream.

> grub2

ARM (32 bit) boots using u-boot.  Aarch64 machines will boot using
grub2 (or is that grub2-efi? - you know better than I do :-)

> hfsplus-tools

As discussed in this thread.

> ocaml-cil
> ocaml-gsl

There are mature 32 bit and 64 bit ARM native backends for the OCaml
compiler.  I've worked on fixing some problems in both.

As for these two packages, CIL is actually fixed upstream, it just
needs to go into the Fedora package (see RHBZ#994968).  GSL depends on
a C library that contains lots of x86 assembler, and so basically
won't work without a lot of porting which no one has done yet.  There
is no BZ for this one, which there obviously should be.

> root

Discussed on this thread already.

> zfs-fuse

This is interesting because it's another package where libguestfs has
to %ifnarch %{arm} because the package is missing on ARM.

The reason it doesn't build is because this package uses an internal
library to provide atomic ops, and this library hasn't been ported to
ARM assembler (although there is a fallback path that uses
pthread_mutex(!)).

There is a BZ (RHBZ#996728) but it is not listed in the spec file.

> So, two conclusions from this:
> 
> 1) People are very bad at following policy here. The majority of the 
> packages that are marked ExcludeArch: arm are not in the tracker bug, 
> and most of those don't appear to have a bug filed at all.
> 
> 2) The rate at which things are being fixed appears to be uninfluenced 
> by (1) - the number of bugs on the tracker may have increased, but the 
> number of packages actually excluded on ARM hasn't. This means that I 
> was grossly overestimating how many packages were broken. I made an 
> assertion without collecting accurate data first, and came to the wrong 
> conclusion. I apologise for that.

But also:

(3) Out of 15000 packages, only about 100 don't build on ARM, and
there are at most 50 missing bugs to fully comply with policy.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top