Confusion with new platforms and packages

[Nathan Robertson]

Hi,

I've been doing a fair amount of work (ie. a fair slice of my free time 
over the last couple of months) on getting Fedora Core booting on Apple 
PowerPC. Because the ppc tree already existed (from my understanding, 
just not tested on Apple hardware), I was given a huge head start. I now 
have a install of FC/devel on my PowerBook and an old PowerMac G3, and 
have been reporting bugs against packages (usually with patches) to 
correct issues I've found. These can be split into two parts:

1. Existing packages, like the kernel needing a .config file that 
produces a kernel that boots, and does something useful.

2. Adding packages that make the system more useful, and are essentially 
equivalents for powerpc of packages that FC ships on x86. One example is 
hfsutils (needed to write a NewWorld boot partition, bugs #117512, #120811).

Bugs reported against #1 types are accepted and fixed. Bugs against #2 
types, it appears that Red Hat engineering people are unsure as to what 
they are expected to do. Quoting bug #117512, Bill Nottingham:

"Hm, I suppose there should be some sort of policy on packages not
required for any officially supported arch."

This is not the only example I've come across of this, just the latest 
one that has led me to post this message. Can somebody senior from Red 
Hat give us some idea as to what the story is here?

FWIW, I believe that we're just "completing" the support for PowerPC, 
not adding a new platform, because it pre-existed in devel. A community 
driven release of a platform previously unsupported in any way by Red 
Hat would certainly be send a really good signal to the doubters out 
there that Fedora Core isn't just Red Hat, just like Mozilla wasn't just 
Netscape (and they had their doubters too).

Regards,
Nathan.