Hi All, I'd like to make a few comments on the secondary arch proposal that was discussed during the Fedora Summit. First, I think secondary arches are a good idea. There are communities out there that are perfectly capable and willing to enable Fedora on various hardware platforms. I think secondary arches are a great enabler for such communities, and I hope they can help spread Fedora to things other than boring old x86. That being said, I agree with spot. There are two key issues that are essentially taking a great idea and sinking it immediately. In order for secondary arches to really work, I believe the arch teams need to be able to host repositories along side the primary arches on fedoraproject.org, and binary isos for the arches (if available) should also be hosted. The fact that one has to host repositories and isos on servers outside of fedoraproject.org basically kills the distinction that it's a true Fedora release. Why? It's simple. The suggestion as it stands is that secondary arches can only use the Fedora name if all changes are in the Fedora packages. However, this will never be the case for fedora-release, which will require yum repo files that point to servers other than fedoraproject.org. Sure, that's a trivial example that can easily be circumvented by providing an "exemption" for that package. However, it hints at another issue which is the fact that people go to http://fedoraproject.org/ to download Fedora. If they now have to go to foo.bar.com to download it, you lose brand distinction. "But we can't BUILD the packages on these arches, so why should we host them?" What difference does that make? If the Board is going to allow secondary arches built on servers _outside_ of the Fedora buildsys to carry the Fedora name, then explain to me why those packages cannot sit on fedoraproject.org. At that point they are officially part of Fedora, and belong with the rest of it. Disk is cheap. I'll personally buy the Fedora project a couple 160G hard drives to host the packages and isos if that is the only reason they can't be hosted. Also, hosting repositories/isos outside of fedoraproject.org basically means those arches lose another major benefit, which is mirroring. The fedora mirror structure is fairly good, and trying to achieve something of similar numbers will simply be very difficult to accomplish. Mirrors can choose not to mirror secondary arches if they wish. Let them make that choice. I strongly urge the Board to consider these points before coming to a final policy for secondary arches. I want to see this change turn into a great move for Fedora, and not just a "dumping of work" as some are already perceiving it to be. josh
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