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Fedora Summit
Fedora Summit
Posted Nov 19, 2006 15:21 UTC (Sun) by jkeatingatredhat (guest, #40062)In reply to: Fedora Summit by dwmw2
Parent article: Fedora Summit
This is one of the huge problems with ppc. It's treated almost like i386/x86_64, but in the wrong way. We're trying to apply the same rules when they just don't work. We need a strong PPC advocate to drive these changes through our tools that deal with building and composing and installing packages, if its even possible. If we just stuck to pure ppc32 this wouldn't be a problem, but ppc64 is just the odd duck. You only want to install ppc32 most the time, but if you HAVE ppc64, prefer ppc64. Our tool set is designed around 'If both are available, install them both' so you wind up with a lot more ppc64 packages than you normally want. However we can't just make them unavilable. We have to figure out some way to actually do what is the Right Thing with our tool set.
As far as new hardware, it would be nice if the release team had access to this new hardware that we're supposed to be supporting. I can't test it, I don't know if it works, I'd really hate to put our name on saying it does. Perhaps if it was on the release testing list, and you had checked it off saying "Yes this is tested and functional" I'd feel much more comfortable. Right now I feel mostly like I'm flying blind.
As far as working as good as other distros, grub for ppc would be nice, as yaboot is rather nasty to expect our normal end users to know how to use (:
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Fedora Summit
Posted Nov 19, 2006 15:35 UTC (Sun) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]
Mostly, the fact that we install a bunch of ppc64 packages is no more of an issue than the fact that we install a bunch of i386 packages on x86_64 installs. Disk is cheap. There's only a few packages which really have problems with that -- and I don't really include firefox in that since it's just a simple packaging bug and easy to fix. The Eclipse one was just a case of being able to find the right version of gcj too, wasn't it? So not using /usr/bin/gcj for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions? I'm fairly sure the KDE one will boil down to something simple too, although I'm not entirely sure what you were referring to there.Unless I'm missing something, it just isn't that much of an issue. And it certainly doesn't have to be an issue for Fedora, since we don't have to be so strict about shipping every devel package for PPC64. That was a RHEL thing.
You should have access to the Cell blade, and hopefully we'll arrange a PS3 some time soon too. If you don't have access to a Pegasos, I'm sure we can arrange that. Other new hardware I mentioned was 'upcoming', and not yet actually supported -- but obviously we can try to make sure you have access to it as and when it becomes real.
Yeah, grub2 would be cute. I'm happier when end-users don't actually have to touch the bootloader at all though.
Fedora Summit
Posted Nov 19, 2006 16:45 UTC (Sun) by jkeatingatredhat (guest, #40062) [Link]
Well, i386 on x86_64 doesn't hurt as we don't really want to run the i386 binary, we PREFER the x86_64 binary. However on ppc, we would usually prefer the ppc binary. The problem is that we don't really treat the package set any differently across the arches. The same things that are multilib on x86_64 are multilib on ppc64. The same -devel packages we ship for i386 are the same for x86_64 and for ppc64. This is where you run into far far more things been ppc64 on an install than ppc, and you run into the bloat.