On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 6:52 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 2013-10-24 at 19:56 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote: > >> It is up to each WG to determine their product requirements. That >> includes which architectures and target users they are trying to >> produce a product for. >> >> > We've done a lot of work over the last few cycles to really bump ARM up >> > to 'first class citizen' status, and a lot of that is coming together - >> > I think reasonably successfully - in F19 and F20. It would be rather odd >> > to go with a change for F21 or F22 which goes in the opposite direction. >> >> ARM is important long term, yes. I don't necessarily think that ARM >> is equally important across all of the existing products. I find it >> more likely that ARM is important enough to have it's own WG and it's >> own product, which may or may not have commonality with the other >> products. > > I'm not entirely sure that makes sense; it seems to be a conceptual > error. ARM is an architecture. In practice, at present, the > ARM-architecture based hardware we support mostly falls into a certain > category that kind of naturally lends itself to a particular kind of > product, but that seems a transient scenario, not a permanent one. And if we think the WGs are unable to adapt to transient scenarios, then we've failed. Computing is an ever-changing world. We work with the situation we have today and for the short-term future, and adapt as changes pop up. > Looked at conceptually, it doesn't make any more sense for there to be > an 'ARM working group' and an 'ARM product' than it does for there to be > an 'x86_64 working group' and an 'x86_64 product', but those are, I > think, prima facie absurd. The concepts of 'working group' and 'product' Yes, x86_64 as a WG is absurd. It's already widely adopted, commonly availalbe, and used in all 3 of the mainly defined products. ARM is not _yet_. > have been drawn up along broadly _functional_ lines, and a 'working > group' or 'product' for a specific system architecture doesn't really > line up with that design. > > I think the approach I implied in my email - making sure the functional > WGs and products we are inventing do not neglect any of our primary > architectures and use cases - is the correct way to go. I think pretending the current class of readily available ARM hardware can fully support the products a WG wants to define is somewhat disingenuous. I'm not saying ARM won't soon, but it's simply not the case today. I fully agree that ARM should be kept in mind during the product creation and included if capable, but I do not think it should necessarily be something that _has_ to be targeted. To get to specifics, I do not foresee the Workstation WG focusing on producing a product that will work equally on ARM. The dearth of workstation style ARM hardware and open graphics drivers would make it even harder to produce that product. This will not always be the case, but it is now and we need products NOW, not whenever ARM catches up. (Please note this is my opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the WG.) Believe me, I would love to see ARM laptops that were just as functional as x86_64 laptops with full open source software support. Bring them on! We'll adapt as we go. Until then we need to focus on the best target for the products, as defined by the WG. josh -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
