FC for ia64?

[David Woodhouse]

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 14:41 -0800, Jesse Barnes wrote:
>What would it take to make ia64 support in Fedora bit more official?  I.e. 
>part of core releases, part of the Extras build process, etc.  I might be 
>interested in taking it on if it's not something huge...
>
>FWIW, I've been using it pretty regularly on an Altix 350 I have here and it's 
>working pretty well for the most part (at least as well as it does on my 
>PowerBook).

There's no magic bullet but here's what was done for PPC, which seems to
be having the desired effect.

- Take snapshots of rawhide at the time of a Fedora Core release, put
  them up for download so that people don't need to be on rawhide.

- Create a tracker bug like the Fedora/PPC one (121179), and make sure
  stuff in it gets fixed. Make sure the install works and new hardware
  is well supported.

- Create a mailing list and try to get people involved.

- Build updated kernel packages if necessary, and feed fixes upstream so
  that they get into the rawhide kernels.

- Find packages which aren't built on your architecture and work out
  why. Fix the problems and persuade the package maintainer to include
  your arch in future.

- Get someone to push the FC4 updates which are built internally to a
  publicly-accessible yum repository.

- Build Extras and Livna packages for your architecture too.

- Make sure qemu works, so those who need i386 binaries can run them.

Of course, it's easier for architectures like PPC and IA64 which are
already present in the internal Red Hat build system and hence in
rawhide -- for Alpha and SPARC it'll be more work because the whole
distro needs to be built, and there may well be GCC work needed. 

-- 
dwmw2