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Hello All |
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I wanted to draft up some thoughts to get some opinions here...I've been |
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fighting with many things PPC in the portage tree in the past little while |
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and have stumbled accross some very difficult resolutions to things. For the |
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most part {$ARCH} = "ppc" is a working solution, but I have found a few |
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places where it causes major heartaches (the recent xforms-089-r1 build which |
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is now masked again is prime example of this). |
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I spent several days on this (very very simple) ebuild and had consultation |
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with many devs in #gentoo-dev, and it appears that the 'working 3 days ago' |
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version is no longer working, and I have no idea why at this point, but this |
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is aside from the point of this email, I will track down the problems and |
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address seperately, it requires big explanations...let me continue, this |
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email is not about a single difficult ebuild. |
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One of the biggest problems with things for the ppc folks right now is the |
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fact that so many things get comitted with no testing on the ppc platform (no |
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one's fault, there are very few of us ppc devs at this point in time to test |
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and holding back portage is not a good thing ;). There is no Quality |
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Assurance happening and it makes gentoo as a whole look very bad having end |
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users test bugs in this manner IMHO. I get a bevy of bugs reported every day |
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(mostly in person in IRC, some on bugs) and the whole of portage has still |
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yet to be tested on ppc. The only way we are finding these errors are end |
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users finding things that don't work when they try and install and either |
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give up on the pkgs and/or gentoo, or reporting the bug and waiting for the |
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fix to happen (where possible). |
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PPC/linux is definately not as mature as x86 linux, and many projects either |
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just do not work on ppc and/or need major adjustments to work on ppc, and |
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this is going to cause many many problems as things move along. In the PPC |
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world it is pretty much standard that many 1.0 (0.1) versions of projects |
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that are not explicity made for ppc work without hitches. This issue is |
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going to amplify drastically if/when sparc joins portage as well. Another |
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problem is that very few Gentoo builds are as simple as ./configure ; make ; |
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make install and require many tweaks, and this along with various patches and |
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updates applied to many ebuilds amplify things even more. Many patches are |
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to fix arch specific issues and do not apply globally. This also holds true |
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for ./configure options, USE options, tweaked Makefiles, etc. |
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Here are the some options I can see for a change at this point in the game: |
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1) ppc go back to it's own rsync module/portage tree (at least for now until a |
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better solution is at hand).. this would give us QA .. something not possible |
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currently w/ ppc in a unified portage and I don't want gentoo ppc to get a |
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'bad name' for everythign being broken |
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and/or |
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|
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2) some sort of arch specific sectioning be built into portage somehow instead |
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of having to use ARCH in multiple places within the same build (which could |
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still lead to big messes as one ARCH may want to move forward a version while |
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another ARCH must wait for a next vendor release for compatability, etc) |
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and/or |
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3) a more intelligent masking setup that keeps a manageable by arch masking (I |
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know this is currently possible, but would require much diligence on the part |
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of _all_ devs comitting to cvs), some way of maybe auto-masking a new build |
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until its 'released' from the ppc packages file by a ppc dev after its been |
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tested. This option would also allow users who wan't to test unkowns the |
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option easily. |
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I'm not saying that things won't work within the current design... it's just |
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exceedingly difficult to do some of the simplest of things (see xforms build) |
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and I have fears (read nightmares) that this ARCH stuff may have a snowball |
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effect as Gentoo grows. IMHO quality control and adequate testing before |
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release should be a very important part of any distribution, especailly one |
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as good as Gentoo and the simple solution of "we need more ppc devs" and/or |
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"everything had to be tested on both ARCH's" is not going to be the soltuion |
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required in this case :) |
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Any thoughts? (**Gerk ducks and runs**) |
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|
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Gerk |