PPC/PPC64 disabled in Koji for dist-f13

[Mat Booth]

2009/10/1 Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at>:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>> Was ppc really such a burden?
>
> Yes. It slowed down builds, and it often triggered bizarre build failures
> which were NOT bugs in the program, but in the toolchain or in some core
> library like glibc, which in turn delayed important updates to the affected
> packages.
>
> In fact, my "favorite" ppc64 issue was a problem with OpenBabel hitting a
> limitation in the ppc64 toolchain: there's a "table of contents" which can
> grow only to a small fixed size, so large compilation units just don't
> compile on ppc64, while being perfectly valid C/C++ and compiling fine on
> all other architectures. (And that's already with the "minimal TOC". Without
> it, the limit is for the whole executable!) OpenBabel's SWIG-generated
> bindings exceeded that limit. We were the only ones hitting it as no other
> distribution is insane enough to build their packages for ppc64. (The
> binaries don't even get actually used as ppc32 is the preferred multilib on
> 64-bit PowerPC!) I played around with both compiler and SWIG flags to reduce
> the amount of TOC entries, which worked for 2 beta releases (requiring
> additional tweaking for the second one), but then it overflowed again. This
> was a big annoyance because the new OpenBabel betas were required for new
> kdeedu betas in Rawhide, so this stalled our KDE work. In the end, upstream
> removed some things from their bindings to get them to build, a quite
> suboptimal solution. IMHO the ppc64 ABI is just completely broken and needs
> to be redesigned from scratch.
>
>        Kevin Kofler
>

Nice bug; this one is my favourite:
https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/1308 -- PPC64 noarch builds
don't expand %{_libdir} to the correct place.

You absolutely *cannot* build Eclipse plugins on ppc64 hosts because
of this beauty. The current workaround is to just keep resubmitting
the build until Koji picks an i386, x86_64 or ppc host. (Nothing to do
with Eclipse either, BTW, seems like an RPM or mock problem.)


-- 
Mat Booth

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