RFC: Page size on PPC/PPC64 builders

[Tom Lane]

Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> writes:
> Tom Lane <tgl at redhat.com> wrote:
>> As for the other points, if we can't provide (and document) the
>> ability for developers to test on a secondary arch, that arch
>> needs to be removed from Fedora completely.  It's useless to
>> expect developers to magically fix things they can't debug.

> PPC is not a secondary architecture at this time, so perhaps
> that's where you are confused.

If it's not a secondary architecture, then the poor state of the
infrastructure for it is even more inexcusable.  We should have more
than one test machine available, and how to get at them should be
documented in some more obvious place than the archives of this list
(which so far as I'm aware we don't even offer search facilities for).
Random people occasionally offering machines by means of the mailing
list is not what I call an organized infrastructure.  At minimum there
needs to be easily-findable information on the fedoraproject wiki about
how to obtain access to test machines.

As for

> That's horseshit.  Complete and utter horseshit.  If the primary
> package maintainer doesn't care about a particular secondary
> architecture then it's no skin off their nose to simply ignore it.

I'm going to call horseshit on you.  Portability problems are frequently
deep enough to require the skills of the primary package maintainer,
or even the key upstream developers.  I think that a secondary arch's
SIG can probably be expected to detect portability issues, but
asking them to take full responsibility for solving them is a project
design doomed to failure.  Even more to the point, portability bugs
are usually "real" bugs, as was already noted upthread.  Any
self-respecting package maintainer *should* be expected to take an
interest in them.  But how can she, without access to test machines?
A secondary arch that can't provide developers with test machines
is not worth being taken seriously.

			regards, tom lane