Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform

Posted Nov 14, 2008 18:27 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform by jspaleta
Parent article: Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform

Fedora depends a lot more on 3rd party repositories to provide software then Debian does. I know that Fedora does a good job providing packages for the architectures that it supports, but third party repos generally only support packages on platforms that are immediately avialable to the individual that has setup the repo.

To get a rought idea of the difference synaptic says that there are 25556 packages avialable for my system. Numbers are not directly comparible, unfortunately.

Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform

Posted Nov 14, 2008 19:26 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (4 responses)

Oh so your complaint was about 3rd party repositories not support ppc equitably. Oh sorry. Here are those numbers for rpmfusion

repoquery --repoid=rpmfusion-free-rawhide-ppc --qf "%{NAME}" -a --archlist=ppc,ppc32,ppc64,noarch|sort -u|wc -l
result: 303

repoquery --repoid=rpmfusion-free-rawhide --qf "%{NAME}" -a --archlist=i386,i586,i686|sort -u|wc -l
result: 404

Again I'm really not seeing a vast superior number. There is a difference yes.. but its not a "vast majority". And even then the difference in numbers has to be examined on a case by case basis. Somethings make sense as being missing on one arch compared to another:
nvidia drivers at rpmfusion...dont work on ppc.
The 3dnow optimized atlas libraries in Fedora..obviously not going to be in ppc.
yaboot...isn't useful on x86 so its not built.

Though I would enjoy seeing a comparison of the number of binary packages in ppc versus x86 in any Deb branch. Care to provide those numbers?

Now if your argument is that Debian just has a lot more packages for whatever arch you can think of. No argument. The Debian community has been grinding away at this for a long long time. I raise a glass to their continued success at being a stable linux platform and with a breathtakingly wide scope and depth of community involvement. I will sleep soundly knowing that even if every other single linux distribution effort flames out, the Debian community will still be there.

But I really don't think the numbers back up the claim that ppc package collection in than the x86 collection in Fedora..no matter how you want to come at it. And that doesn't come without a cost. We have a dedicated group of ppc contributors who do a really good job of fixing bugs and getting ppc patches submitted to upstream projects so everyone can benefit...including Debian.

We always seem to shake loose fascinating issues when the compiler toolchain revs and we need to do mass rebuilds. When those issues are ppc specific, our ppc contributors are there helping other maintainers who do not have direct access to ppc hardware. I'm pretty sure I've had to rely on them more than once for one of my packages that was not building in ppc during a development phase. Niche arch specific knowledge is hard to come by, Fedora's ppc support is a direct result of the dedication of the ppc knowledgable contributors we have onboard in the community. It's not a business directive to keep supporting ppc or not in Fedora...its a community effort.

-jef

Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform

Posted Nov 14, 2008 20:14 UTC (Fri) by adj (subscriber, #7401) [Link] (3 responses)

> Though I would enjoy seeing a comparison of the number of binary packages in ppc versus x86 in any Deb branch. Care to provide those numbers?

$ for dist in stable testing unstable; do for section in main contrib non-free; do for arch in i386 powerpc; do wget -q -O /tmp/debian-${dist}-${section}-${arch}-Packages.bz2 ftp://http.us.debian.org/debian/dists/${dist}/${section}/binary-${arch}/Packages.bz2; echo -e Package count in ${dist} ${section} ${arch}: \\c; bzip2 -dc /tmp/debian-${dist}-${section}-${arch}-Packages.bz2 | grep -c "^Package: "; done; done; done
Package count in stable main i386: 18071
Package count in stable main powerpc: 17807
Package count in stable contrib i386: 248
Package count in stable contrib powerpc: 172
Package count in stable non-free i386: 311
Package count in stable non-free powerpc: 219
Package count in testing main i386: 22583
Package count in testing main powerpc: 22231
Package count in testing contrib i386: 296
Package count in testing contrib powerpc: 252
Package count in testing non-free i386: 367
Package count in testing non-free powerpc: 291
Package count in unstable main i386: 23848
Package count in unstable main powerpc: 23445
Package count in unstable contrib i386: 292
Package count in unstable contrib powerpc: 239
Package count in unstable non-free i386: 432
Package count in unstable non-free powerpc: 321
$

Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform

Posted Nov 14, 2008 20:37 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

Great thanks. I'm not seeing a grossly different trend there versus Fedora. ppc trends a little lower than x86 even for Debian.

Assuming my math is right....the ratio of ppc/x86 binaries is:
Debian unstable main: 0.98x
Fedora rawhide: 0.98y

x > y : Debian wins, and I'm okay with that.

Saying anything more than that will require some detailed analysis which will get really complicated fast..due to packaging convention differences across the distributions.

It would be interesting to pick apart the differences between i386 and ppc in Debian unstable compared to fedora rawhide..comparing the set of missing packages in ppc. Assuming those distribution branches share a reasonably common build chain currently, that might help identify obvious distro specific patchset that should be evaluated by upstream and horse-traded across the distribution lines.

-jef

Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform

Posted Nov 14, 2008 21:14 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Like I said before I think Fedora does a good job.

Also I am coming from user experience from a few years ago, so it seems like things have gotten better.

Canonical announces Ubuntu for the ARM platform

Posted Nov 15, 2008 1:37 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Also, Fedora users don't need to depend on many third party repositories. For users needing patent encumbered non-free software they used to go to Livna. Now they can go to RPMFusion instead which is a merger of many such third party repositories re-using much of the infrastructure bits developed within Fedora. The maintainers are usually involved with Fedora as well so there isn't much of a difference overall including PPC support. The difference from Debian is that such a repository is split away completely and is a independent effort not included or enabled by default, in part due to legal reasons.