For your consideration: Secondary Architectures in Fedora

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 15:37 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 5/29/07, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:
> > afaik, that's already current practice (ie, ExcludeArch requires a bug
> > to be filed).
> 
> right.... so lets do the same for secondary arches for now. If it
> becomes clear that builds blow up a lot for secondary arches causing
> widespread headaches for maintainers trying to get updates out to
> primary arches we can consider adopting the policy that secondary arch
> build failures don't fail the whole build.

As this would require more than a policy change, I'm very hesitant to do
that. Koji would need some code changes to make this possible, I'm
committing to doing that work, but I don't want to waste time watching
everything catch on fire while everyone screams for that code to be
finished and the buildsystem fixed.

I know this is going to break a lot for secondary architectures. Things
like glibc and gcc are going to fail a few times on sparc before we get
it right. Consider this for multiple secondary architectures (alpha,
arm, ia64, s390, sparc), and you start to see why this needs not to hold
up the primary architectures. Packagers start cursing at the slow and
broken architectures, and people try to short circuit the process by
just assuming those arches won't work and setting ExcludeArch
agressively.

~spot