fedora for ARM

[Brendan Conoboy]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> Do you really think we're going to get them to care about cross builds
> too? I _did_ care about cross-compilation, and I gave up on it. I really
> don't think we have much chance of getting package maintainers (and
> upstreams) to handle it. Unfortunately.

No, I don't think it's realistic that existing package maintainers 
should have to directly handle cross build failures as well as native 
build failures.  This is largely a volunteer effort and adding more load 
to volunteers is going to have a negative impact.

I do believe that people who care about cross building could share in 
the responsibility for packages that fail to build in a cross 
environment.  Fedora is a project in the spirit of cooperation and I'm 
sure a large number of maintainers wouldn't mind the extra help.  For 
many autotools-based packages, the changes are minimal.

In a perfect (bug free) world, cross support could simply be added to 
Koji, the switch could be thrown, and all packages would magically build 
as crosses.  Of course, that's not going to happen.  It will start with 
1 package, then 2.... whatever the final method is, it will start with 
the desirous, then continue with the willing.

Like suggested in the secondary arches discussion, failed cross builds 
would not hold up packages that build fine natively (The hypothetical 
cross-friendly flag could be removed, even).  Part of the fun with 
Fedora is breaking new ground, but we don't want to spoil things for 
anybody else in the process.

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com