For your consideration: Secondary Architectures in Fedora

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 10:07:04AM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 16:00 -0700, Chris Weyl wrote:
> > In other words, by only failing a build when a primary arch fails, we
> > enable the inclusion of many other architectures for those who care
> > about them, without imposing additional burdens on all maintainers
> > (who may not care about them).
> 
> We have that already. The existing policy, allowing ExcludeArch but
> requiring a bug to be filed, works extremely well.
> 
> > Otherwise, why bother making a distinction at all?
> 
> A question which had occurred to me also. We seem to be trying to
> 'solve' a problem which hasn't actually been demonstrated to exist yet.
> 
> For building (and scheduling) actual releases, there may be some point
> in making the distinction. For the routine package builds, it seems
> unnecessary.

There is a problem, while the ppc{,64} koji buildboxes aren't the slowest
thing in the world, in my experience they are 25% to 100%
slower than the i?86/x86_64 boxes (I'm always waiting on them for gcc/glibc
etc. builds) and with addition of sparc{,64} that will be still orders of
magnitude slower (not sure what hardware is planned for koji sparc* builds,
but even 8way UltraII is horribly slow).  So for secondary arches
we really need async builds instead of sync builds.

	Jakub