Kevin Kofler <kevin.kof...@chello.at> writes:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> But you're dodging the larger point -- Fedora has, de facto, demoted big
>> endian support in its entirety to a second-hand effort, rather than
>> distributed the workload much more widely. Given M package maintainers
>> and N secondary-platform volunteers, it is clear M > N by orders of
>> magnitude.
> I think it is only fair that the people who actually care get to do the
> work. Package maintainers can still fix their packages for PPC, they'll even
> get e-mail reports from the secondary arch Koji if the builds fail. (It
> already happens for the other secondary architectures.) They just won't be
> required to do it anymore. You can't force volunteers (and many Fedora
> developers are volunteers; even those paid by RH are paid primarily to work
> on RHEL, not Fedora, and often do Fedora work in their own free time) to
> work on something they're not interested in.
You may have a point about volunteer maintainers, though I'd hope they'd
be concerned about the quality and portability of their packages anyway.
But for anyone working for Red Hat, it's insanely shortsighted to think
that not testing on BE platforms is going to save work. We're going to
have to make this stuff work on BE platforms for RHEL later on, and it
will just be that much more painful if it happens months or years after
the changes are fresh. Quite aside from people having forgotten the
details of what they changed, upstream projects could be locked into
little-endian-only file formats or other hard-to-change decisions by
that time.
>> Was ppc really such a burden?
> Yes. It slowed down builds, and it often triggered bizarre build failures
> which were NOT bugs in the program, but in the toolchain or in some core
> library like glibc, which in turn delayed important updates to the affected
> packages.
Again, would you rather debug glibc now, or later? "Not at all" is not
an option.
> [ ppc64 horror story snipped ]
Well, I'm by no means wedded to ppc64; I just want *some* BE
architecture in the primary set. Maybe a reasonable compromise would be
to include ppc but not ppc64? That would cover basic BE portability
issues, if not the occasional BE-and-64-bit bug. And it would halve the
present workload of the PPC builders, which might help the build time
issue.
regards, tom lane
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