----- Original Message ----- > On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Bastien Nocera <bnocera@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > If phones and tablets aren't the primary focus, what is? Development > > boards, for the sake of running Fedora ARM on something? Server systems > > that don't exist yet (or aren't widely available[1])? > > They're not the primary focus of mainline Fedora either. We're > CURRENTLY focusing on development boards (100s of examples), desktop > like systems (Trimslice and other similar systems), netbooks/laptop > style systems and the various media centre style devices (STB/media > sticks etc), and servers. > > The reason we're not focusing on phones/tablets at the moment is a > number of reasons including things like user experience, resources and > other upstream support of those style of devices. The phone/tablet > manufacturers are dreadful at upstreaming things and the vast majority > of devices are locked (see also the bits of this thread about ARM > devices shipping Windows). You don't want to support devices that can't boot Linux, fair enough, but there's plenty of devices where we could run Linux, given a specific kernel. Seeing as the Fedora rootfs that are shipped for ARM don't include a kernel, I don't see what the blocker is here. > Also at the moment the vast majority of the Desktop UXes are a > dreadful experience on tablets whether that be x86 or ARM based. And not shipping something people can use to bootstrap development on those devices is going to help how? yum install @gnome-desktop probably took 3 hours on the device I tried it on, between downloading and installing those packages. Fedora having those rootfs/spins available will help bootstrapping the development of the UI on those devices. > All of the above will improve in time at which point there will be > more reason to focus towards that but to date we've been focusing on > other areas. That's not to say others can't focus on that if that's > their desire... it is after all Fedora. Why do you keep saying "it's not the focus" then? Why ship LXDE-based rootfs and not even ship similar rootfs archives for GNOME, even tagged as a development release? > > I'm interested in Fedora on phones, tablets, tiny dongly media centers, > > set-top boxes, Wi-Fi routers and eBook readers. Why wasn't I allowed to > > have permissions to run image making on the ARM instances? I wanted to > > create a rootfs with gnome-shell as the default, similar to the desktop > > live CD, and couldn't because "it's not the focus". Why should the package > > maintainers carry the burden of maintaining packages that get compiled on > > ARM if their interests aren't "the focus"? I know I'd get yelled at if I > > started adding "ExcludeArch: arm" to my packages, so why is it OK for the > > ARM SIG to dismiss other Fedora contributors' interests, and actively > > block their attempts at making Fedora more available? > > > > I'm not sure what you mean by "Why wasn't I allowed to have > permissions to run image making on the ARM instances?". We decided not > to ship the gnome-shell spin for this release of ARM as out of the box > it wouldn't have worked It wouldn't have worked because nobody stepped up to fix LLVM in the ARM SIG. > and would have hence provided a terrible > experience. This was discussed in our weekly meeting. Tag it as a development/beta/whatever spin/rootfs and do it anyway. > There's nothing to stop someone doing a remix of gnome-shell with > third party drivers/kernels etc but unfortunately the way the spins > are build doesn't allow the use of third party repositories but this > is no different to the rel-eng policy for mainline x86 but then > there's nothing stopping it from being done on another ARM system and > many people have created remixes for both F-18 [1] and F-19 [2] so > we're not explicitly stopping you from creating a gnome-shell remix. Which brings me back to the question of why I haven't been allowed an account to create a spin using the Fedora build servers. I doubt that my 700 MHz/384 MB device is suitable for handling large packages and images to create a spin. > We've not been "dismiss other Fedora contributors' interests, and > actively block their attempts" in fact we actively encourage people > that are interested in rolling up their sleeves and helping out in > their particular interest area. You've emailed me directly about how > to create remixes and I've provided you details on how to do that and > if there's someone else who is causing issues please contact me off > list and I'll address that particular issue but I fail to see our > decision to not ship a spin that doesn't currently work as blocking > others ability to remix a spin as they choose as many others have > successfully done so. If it were an x86/x86-64 spin I wanted to create, I have access to plenty of machines, plenty of power, and plenty of storage. This isn't my case for ARM. If somebody were to send me an ARM device on which I can plug 4GB of RAM and a SATA hard-drive, I wouldn't be asking why I didn't get access to this build service to create spins. That's again not the case. > As for "burden of maintaining packages that get compiled on ARM" I > don't believe you've had any extra burden, there have been very few > GNOME packages that have had compile issues on ARM and I believe for > the vast majority of those few that have the ARM team have fixed them > without any intervention required. Except the shell doesn't run, so we wouldn't know. -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
