[Aurora-sparc-devel] Install Cd's?

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday 28 April 2008, Dean Anderson wrote:
> I'm not accusing you of hiding anything with malice or bad intent.
> Primarilly its your process that is flawed, and its the process that
> needs to be fixed.

Dean, have you attempted to do a rebuild in the way the fedora-release 
engineering team recommends, to see if you can duplicate it?

Lots and lots of things have changed in a very short time, and what may have 
been true for prior releases is almost certainly not true now.  The Fedora 
Project process is now what is being used to make Aurora; you are aware of 
this, right?  Are you saying the Fedora process is flawed?

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ReleaseEngineering/Overview for an overview 
of the process that Tom, as a member of the Fedora Release Engineering team, 
has helped build over several Fedora releases.

The intent, as you can see at 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/SPARC , is for Aurora to be 
merged into Fedora as Fedora/SPARC.

I personally look forward to when these configs and such are added to the Wiki 
at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/SPARC to fill in the "*** 
TODO: List buildservers, specs, here ***" section.  But unless and until I am 
willing to spend the time doing it, I really can't complain about the current 
state.  I can donate hardware to help (is the E3000 still running, Dennis?), 
or donate my time to build (I don't have enough of that, sorry).  Or donate 
my time and machines to test.

But, if I might make a suggestion, Dennis, Tom: an update of the Auroralinux 
website pointing to the Fedora/SPARC pages, and a filling out of those pages, 
would be very welcomed once the hard and important work of the merge is done 
(I've been seeing the traffic on the Fedora-sparc mailing list; whew, lots of 
work going on).  

I realize Fedora/SPARC isn't here yet.  But, Dean, that is where it's headed.  
And, quite honestly, I'd rather Tom and Dennis spend their time doing 
something towards the future rather than documenting what is shortly going to 
be the past.  After all, 2.9x was labeled beta and shouldn't be used in 
production.  If you are, then you need to understand the risks and 
responsibilities of doing that; including that you may not be able to 
recompose from source.

But understand that the recompose issue you see with the releases you've tried 
it with will be moot soon enough.  While I personally would love to see 
rebuild instructions in their entirety posted, I also know well enough that 
Tom and Dennis are working on the Fedora project itself, and that the SPARC 
dist isn't the only thing vying for their attentions.

And, IMHO, by merging into the Fedora Project proper, the process is 
being 'fixed.'  The Fedora process is quite transparent, once you find which 
windows to look through.  It is also a very repeatable process; I know I 
would prefer sparc-specific patches to go upstream on the packages in 
question so that a compose of Fedora/SPARC is just as automatic as a compose 
of Fedora/i386 is.  This also means that the same processes and code that are 
getting many eyes in the i386 and x86_64 world is turning out the SPARC dist; 
this will be a very good place to be and will help the SPARC Fedora be the 
best SPARC Linux it can be.  And it means that the same build/compose 
instructions that work on i386 will JUST WORK on SPARC.

Dean, perhaps you need to study the Fedora process and see how it self-hosts 
and bootstraps.  You may find your concerns are completely taken care of.  
But, if they are not, word is that Ubuntu is looking for help in their SPARC 
port.
-- 
Lamar Owen
www.pari.edu