Mike, actually I don't want to discuss it here, I think it's not a good place. IMO AArch64 is too young to introduce it. When I started my packaging life there is no such arch.
You may noticed that from 2013 there are many such requests appeared, all of them have same content and a patch automatically generated by a script. That's what Red Hat people are doing, in fact about 1800 packages have received such request. I cannot say this is right or wrong, solving the problem may via many ways. AArch64 is an new arch we finally have to face. I know what you want to express, In fact it's true that we cannot ask every upstream to update their config. I use autoreconf to reconfigure, but sometimes it cannot solve the problem. So I consider a request at upstream. Applying such a big patch is cumbersome, and of course ridiculous. Some developers at SUSE have already discussed the problem of this. They want to fix it by patching the RPM as you expected. But I don't know the progress now, and in Fedora there is no such patch available now, and maybe for a while. Red Hat people threw out a point: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-April/181055.html Please have a look. We also welcome you to discuss this problem with us. We are looking forward to such discussion. Thanks.
