For your consideration: Secondary Architectures in Fedora

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 18:44 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > If the maintainer decides to excludearch
> > that arch... then so be it...but its then at least documented for
> > later investigation.
> 
> afaik, that's already current practice (ie, ExcludeArch requires a bug
> to be filed).
> 
> -- Rex
> 

Except that we're talking about adding a few more architectures here -
sparc, arm, etc.  That's a much larger matrix and the problems are
likely to be much larger than what we have today.

Right now inside of Red Hat we've had this problem I call "spending 50%
of your time on 3% of your user base."  I don't want to end up in a
situation where we have build failures holding up major development work
when those architectures aren't relevant to most developers nor most
users.  But at the same time, those developers who are passionate about
that platform will enjoy a power that most people don't have: the
ability to (responsibly!) fix up a large number of packages across the
tree.  There's a trade off here, but I think it's a good one.

--Chris