[Fedora-ia64-list] F8 for ia64 now available

[Doug Chapman]

I certainly understand your frustrations however we need to look
forward, not backward.  We have made great progress during the F8 cycle,
although I admit a lot of that progress may not be visible to the end
user, it has been more in the building of the releases and fixing a lot
of individual packages.  This is exactly what is needed in order to get
Fedora ia64 back on par with the other architectures.

While GUI installs may not work on some systems we do have usable bits
when installed in text mode.  The vast majority of ia64 servers have no
graphics head at all.  Also, keep in mind that we are still at the
developmental stage for Fedora-ia64.

Starting in a week or so I hope to start building the rawhide (fedora
development tree) builds, these will also include installable iso
images.  This is the right place to address these installation and
packaging issues.  There simply are not enough resources in our
relatively small Fedora-ia64 community to do both respins of Fedora 8
_and_ rawhide.

- Doug


On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 11:49 -0700, John L. Bass wrote:
> Doug writes:
> > I don't plan on rebuilding F8 iso images.  This would be better
> > addressed in the rawhide tree for F9.
> 
> I personally believe this is a mistake for several reasons.
> 
> 	1) The process that produced the iso's did not include a reasonable
> 	   first pass test cycle before they were frozen. Leaving GUI installs
> 	   on SR870 reference platforms broken because of a simple packaging
> 	   error. Volunteer help for this testing prior to ia64 F8 iso general
> 	   release was available.
> 
> 	2) Fedora release cycle is 6 months, and given that Fedora ia64 bits
> 	   tend to follow general release by several weeks, it's likely that
> 	   potentially clean ia64 iso's are 4-5 months away.
> 
> 	3) At least on SR870 reference platforms, the last three iso's are
> 	   broken for GUI installs.
> 
> 	4) All of this reflects badly on Fedora ia64 in general.
> 
> Until such a time that Fedora adopts ia64 as a primary release, it's unlikely
> there will be clean packages for everything that is in the i386 tree. The
> accepted process in those trees is to only include new packages which build
> on supported platforms and are stable. Otherwise the next Fedora release contains
> the last stable release for that package.
> 
> Architectures which are not part of the main stream testing process should adopt
> a similar policy ... release with the last known stable version of a package, to
> have a complete release. Yes, this means there might be some small version skew
> between a mainstream Fedora release and the packages in a Fedora ia64 release.
> But the release will be complete in itself, and not crippled with omissions.
> 
> John