[fab] Architecture Policy.

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 09:06 -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
> On 11/15/06, Dave Jones <davej at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Just food for thought regarding PPC.  I'm not an advocate for or
> against PPC but I did want to point out that from our stats the PPC's
> account for a very tiny percentage of our overall userbase
> http://fedoraproject.org/awstats/stats/FC6-Nov-16.png (0.4%)  On a
> side note, I have no idea if this method of stats collecting really
> works so take it for what it is :D

That can't account for people getting things directly from mirrors.  And
if a certain large PowerPC company has an internal tier 1 mirror of
Fedora you won't get any hits from there for PPC.  Remember, 90% of all
statistics are lies ;)

That's certainly not to say that PPC isn't a smaller userbase than
x86/x86_64.  I think that's fairly common knowledge.  I just happen to
think the tracking doesn't give you the full picture for anything
really.  And I would guess that the userbase for everything is larger
than what those statistics are saying.  Whether it's accurately
proportional can be debated forever.

josh