Phase out 32bit ppc due to bugfix and maintenance burden

[Josh Boyer]

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Al Dunsmuir <al.dunsmuir at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> On Monday, May 12, 2014, 11:11:49 AM, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> Even if build failures were the major problem, solving those isn't
>> actually going to result in a working ppc32 platform.  There's little
>> invested in upstream software development on the platform.  The
>> software will bloat over time and grow beyond the resources these
>> machines have.  I'm certainly not trying to dissuade you from pursuing
>> your own interests, but asking the broader Fedora maintainer pool to
>> help doesn't seem appropriate.
>
> At  work,  we  don't have application-level AIX systems anymore - only
> virtualized systems running in LPARs on larger systems. I suspect that
> nearly  all of the ppc64 individual users are running on hardware that
> commercial users would consider to at least some degree vintage (or at
> least not mainstream).

Very much no.

> This  puts  Power  systems in an odd place between Fedora, Centos, and
> Redhat. It tends to limit the number of folks interested in working on
> Power  systems  in  general  to those with commercial interests, which
> means  they  may tend to be less interested in contributing to Fedora.

On the contrary, the Fedora ppc64 efforts (more accurately POWER
efforts) are driven in large part by the lone commercial interest in
POWER today: IBM.  They have put, and are continuing to put,
significant resources into making sure Fedora runs well on POWER
platforms.

> As  Fedora in general tends to be the incubator for new code and ideas
> for the other two, this may hurt the Power platform in general.

I disagree.  The recent POWER8 open KVM announcements clearly
underline the value of making POWER a more open platform, and that
makes Fedora a great incubator for the future in those efforts.

> I'll  agree that there is at times more affection than sanity involved
> with  wanting  to use or support vintage hardware.
>
> The  issue  of  supporting  vintage hardware is not isolated to ppc32.
> There  are  quite  a  few  folks  who  use x86 32-bit hardware who are
> running  into  the  same  issues in areas such as video support. There
> just happen to be far more users of Intel hardware than ppc (32-bit or
> 64-bit).

Yes.  I believe 32-bit intel will face the same issue, though several
years down the road.  Intel seems to want to cling to 32-bit hardware
and make it even weirder (e.g. Quark) for some reason, but I suspect
they'll eventually stop that at some point.

> The  intent  is not to simply use Fedora resources, but to grow skills
> and  experience  that  can  also  contribute to ppc64, x86 and x86_64.

I think that is a good idea in theory.  In practice, I don't think it
will actually pan out that way.  The number of people that have access
to x86_64 machines is significantly larger than ppc32, so whatever
net-effect ppc32 has in growing the broader contributor base will be
very small.

> Proven  packagers  don't  suddenly appear - they start contributing in
> their  areas  of  interest  and  over  time gain enough knowledge (and
> trust) to contribute to the community in a broader way.

Yes, true.  At the same time, the existing packagers already have
access to things that are much more relevant to the broader Fedora
user base and package set.  ppc32 (and to be fair, ppc64) is something
many of them view as irrelevant, though they still try and fix issues
that come up.  It's a burden for them.

> Until   now,   the   ppc64  maintainers  have kept the ppc32 user land
> operational  via  multi-arch.   They  have  also kept many of the core
> ppc32  core  components in good shape too.
>
> It  may  well  be more appropriate to create a remix, targeted towards
> this  ppc32 hardware. This remix could just be the core system, if the
> ppc32  userland  components  continued  to  exist  in  a  viable form.
> Without  that,  the  effort becomes more difficult, and the number of
> packages delivered drastically reduced.

A remix for those interested would possibly be a great idea.  I think
several years ago Freescale had a Fedora-like/ish remix thing, but
it's long since been abandoned internally there and it wasn't very
public to begin with.

josh