[Mageia-sysadm] ARM port and BuildSystem

[Michael Scherer]

Le lundi 04 avril 2011 à 19:44 +0200, nicolas vigier a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> There was some discussions at last council meeting about making ARM an
> official port, and adding ARM machines in the build system :
> http://meetbot.mageia.org/mageia-meeting/2011/mageia-meeting.2011-03-28-18.33.log.html#l-381
> 
> Rtp has been working on a Mageia ARM port for some time, and I think he
> plans to have something useable soon, maybe for Mageia 1st release.
> After asking to rtp, a machine we could use for building packages on
> ARM is OpenRD :
> http://newit.co.uk/shop/products.php?cat=9
> It costs around £203.00 or 230 euros (+ shipping). So I think that's not
> very expensive.

I still do have a pandaboard available. It just take that someone in
Paris fetch it and to decide where we place it ( and a case around it
would be nicer, and there is nothing to run on it yet ). 

> However, this machine is a lot slower than the x86_64 build servers we
> have, so building big packages like LibreOffice will take much more
> time. And if we don't want to slow down all the buildsystem, maybe we
> should make the successufl ARM build not mandatory to upload packages on
> x86_64 and i586. So this require some changes in the BS. But I think
> it's something that can be done.

That for sure something we can do, but then we should also give us
objectives to fullfill ( like "we should strive to have a synced
release" ) and also objectives in term of hardware to one day make them
in sync.

Moreover if this is not mandatory, don't you fear that the arch will be
too much out of sync ( as this was the case for ppc/sparc in the
past ) ? 
I would also be concerned about the way we manage freeze if the arch is
late, and the complexity that will occurs. 


Also what about stuff like :
- remote shell access ( if there is a arch dependent bugs )
- various tests ( automated rebuild, youri, etc ) 

For remote shell access, we could offer VMs for that, but I can hear rtp
screaming as I type this email :). 
In fact, the same could be said about rebuilded, but I do not know how
good is the emulation of arm using qemu.

-- 
Michael Scherer