Re: Official builds for aarch64 Linux?

[Christian Lohmaier <lohmaier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Pawel, *,

On Thu, Nov 28, 2024 at 3:34 PM Pawel Moll <pawel.moll@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> […]
> Long story short, because I know it generally works (if nothing else, I use Ubuntu-provided LO on my aarch64 workstation) I've gone and build it myself, based on the wiki instructions. There were 2 small problems on the and some unit tests are failing (innocently at the first sight), but the result seems good enough for now for the user who asked for it. That made me think, though, along the lines of:
>
> What would it take to see official builds happening for aarch64 Linux?

You basically gave the answer yourself: Distros usually provide
LibreOffice for their users, so TDF doesn't really see the need to
fill the gap here. Linux downloads of TDF provided versions of
LibreOffice are a tiny fraction of those for Windows - and at least
for now aarch64 for linux is very niche so there'd be even less
demand. So chicken-and-egg issue on the one hand, and demand already
fulfilled by distros.

> Of course the small issues I mentioned would have to be ironed out, but that is not a big problem I think and I can make it happen one way or another (although will have some questions on the way). I also looked closer at the information on wiki and I see that the CI system uses a collection of Tinderboxes as builder systems (so I assume it would have to be an official Tinderbox for an official build, but I'm not sure what makes them "official"?). Is there something else? Any fundamental problems that must be addressed first?

Well we kinda mix the terms tinderbox and CI builders/agents nowadays.
In the past we were using mozilla's tinderbox framework to provide
daily builds, but since then those have all been moved to jenkins -
but after all that's just technicalities anyway. While the tinderboxes
use the same feature sets as official builds (and same baseline
distro) the "official" builds are done on separate systems.

So while full-blown CI isn't possible due to resource limitations
(fast machines that can build in reasonable-for-ci times are
expensive...) - what might be doable is a daily aarch64 build.

There were some fundamental issues in the past that made us decide to
drop 32bit linux builds, namely that the baseline toolchain just was
no longer supported anymore (old base-OS and more-or-less recent gcc
via devtools). Distro's don't need to care about their builds running
on ~every distro version/old installations, they can build against
their system libraries... Our current baseline is Almalinux 8 with
devtoolset-12, and there's AARCH version for that, and while I didn't
check whether devtoolset and others are available, at least that point
doesn't seem to be a big hurdle.

So it depends on your POV whether those would be "official". For the
moment I have no plans to do release builds for Linux aarch64 - that
might change in future.

ciao
Christian