[fab] Architecture Policy.

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 05:57:04AM -0600, David Woodhouse wrote:

 > I'm particularly interested in the decision to stop counting PowerPC as
 > a primary architecture. I've heard rumours that this decision was in
 > part because PPC was responsible for most of the recent release slippage
 > -- but that doesn't seem to be backed up by the slip announcements --
 > the first one for FC6² lists only one PPC-specific issue in the five
 > problems that caused the slip, and the second one³ doesn't seem to
 > mention _anything_ that's specific to PPC.

>From my perspective, one reason to relegate PPC to secondary is that
when you're busy, *NO-ONE* looks at or works on PPC kernel bugs.
Half the time I feel like I'm the only person looking at x86, but
that's irrelevant -- I (and most other people who look at Fedora kernel
bugs) have no PPC knowledge whatsoever. (And likely to stay that way).

It's completely unacceptable to have an architecture be considered
primary when we can't do a thing about any incoming bugs, especially
when those bugs are of the form "my Mac doesn't boot".
If they were "my sound doesn't work", it'd be a lesser issue, but they're
nearly always the nasty "oh crap" species of bug.

Note, in no way am I saying this is a failure on your part, I completely
realise that you've been buried alive in OLPC stuff the last few months,
but we don't have a "stand-in dwmw2".  There may be a handful of
@redhat.com folks with the prerequisite ppc knowledge, but unless they
have a) the time and b) the motivation, these bugs aren't going to get fixed.
I've tried engaging upstream (benh, paulus etc) on some of the obvious
PPC bugs, some stick, and then get fixed upstream, others.. not so much.

Looking at the current bug FC6 kernel lists, there's only a half dozen
obvious "ppc only" bugs out of 213, but that considering it's used
a lot less than x86/x86-64, the ratio of bugs/users is probably the
pretty close.  The only difference is that the x86/x86-64 bugs are getting
attention (slowly but surely).

		Dave

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