[fab] Architecture Policy.

[Christopher Blizzard]

I just wanted to follow up with my thoughts on this topic from the 
meeting.  Some of it is colored with my own ideas, and I'm sorry for 
that.  But I wanted to make sure that everyone understood what we were 
talking about doing here.  Feedback is welcome.

The problem that we're trying to solve here is two-fold in my opinion.

1. That the arches with very little market share (ppc, s390, ia64) are 
part of the build process and they die on a regular basis.  We want a 
way to decouple active development from the smaller arches in a way that 
still allows them to thrive.

2. Encouraging development for the community that cares about the 
smaller arches.  Let's face it, lots of interesting and smart people 
spend time on the smaller arches.  They are passionate and they care, 
and their work almost always encourages the whole of the project.  And 
you never know when a big project might come along that uses one of 
those arches, and you want to be ready when it does.

#1 means that we need to make it possible to have "following" builds for 
the smaller arches.  That's going to require changes on our part, 
something we want to do.  It also means that anyone can contribute a set 
of build machines for one of those arches.  I think that was an 
important part of making it successful as well.

#2 is more subtle, and I think that we found a few things that make it 
possible.  We're opening up the entire tree which means that you can 
substantially increase the number of people who can participate from the 
community all over the tree to fix small arch problems.  People who care 
about ppc can work anywhere, any time.  That's what the arch teams are 
for.  Also, if you can build from Fedora sources, you can call it 
Fedora.  We're happy to host the builds as official builds on the 
download page, even if they show up later than the official release.

--Chris