For your consideration: Secondary Architectures in Fedora

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 19:35 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> Not quite.  How do we that right now all of our builds in rawhide don't 
> fail on s390 currently?  We don't.  Chances are they work, but maybe 
> something in the rawhide compiler broke there.  Assuming the s390 
> compiler is broken, would you consider this a partially failed build if 
> we haven't started a build on it and therefore can't know the problem 
> exists?  It succeeded on i386 and x86-64 and ppc and we push it to the 
> repos.
> 
>  From a Red Hat perspective, it would be nice if we started doing side 
> s390 builds so we can keep on top of any issues as we'll have to care 
> about this when we branch for our next Enterprise offering.  If it fails 
> in our own side builds, we'd get notified but it wouldn't be a failure 
> to the Fedora system because it just didn't start an s390 build at all. 
>   But when the Fedora build succeeds, it would be prudent for someone to 
> rebuild the s390 package with the same changes.
> 
> That is pretty much exactly what is being proposed.  But automated. 

Except we're not just talking about S390 as a secondary arch -- we're
talking about things like Alpha, SPARC, IA64 where people really are
actively trying to make a working distribution.

You're right that if we let some builds just silently fail and go ahead
anyway, that'll result in the affected repositories being a complete
mess. All the more reason why it should need at least a _trivial_ amount
of attention from the package maintainer before the build gets pushed
anyway. That's in _addition_ to the fact that it could well be a generic
problem which affects all architectures, just not in a way that happens
to cause a build failure on the primary architecture(s) with this phase
of the moon.

-- 
dwmw2