[fab] Architecture Policy.

[Christopher Blizzard]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 11:08 -0500, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
>> 1. That the arches with very little market share (ppc, s390, ia64) are 
>> part of the build process and they die on a regular basis. 
> 
> Really? That ('on a regular basis') isn't my experience, whether you're
> talking about build machines dying (except the S390) or whether you're
> talking about the occasional compiler bugs or failure to build
> individual packages.
> 
> Every architecture will suffer occasional build machine outages,
> compiler bugs or compile failures in packages -- but I'm certainly not
> aware that PowerPC in particular has more than its fair share.
> 
> It sounds like you're just saying "Making a distribution is hard. Let's
> do less of it".

No, it's "Making a distribution is hard.  How do you enable the people 
who care to be able to take a more active role in making it happen?"

>> 2. Encouraging development for the community that cares about the 
>> smaller arches.  Let's face it, lots of interesting and smart people 
>> spend time on the smaller arches.  They are passionate and they care, 
>> and their work almost always encourages the whole of the project.  And 
>> you never know when a big project might come along that uses one of 
>> those arches, and you want to be ready when it does.
> 
> It's OK. There seems to be a lot of pressure to use Ubuntu in the one
> we're thinking of already -- I'm sure they'll cope if they have to drop
> Fedora because we mess up the FC7/PPC release with a new process that
> isn't ready for production yet :)
> 

I'm hoping we don't screw it up.  I think that we wouldn't have talked 
about it if we didn't think that what we're doing isn't working today. 
I want to feel out how we can actually make things better, not worse. 
Please tell us how we can help enable you and the rest of the PPC 
community into better partners.  It was my hope that by enabling the PPC 
folks to work with freedom to walk all over the tree as part of a 
specific arch team that they would get more involved, not less.  Do you 
not think that this is the case?  Please tell me if you think I'm wrong 
about this.

--Chris