Re: RFC: Portability should be a higher priority for Guix (was Re: 01/01: build-system/meson: Really skip the 'fix-runpath' phase on armhf.)

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi again Mark,

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:

> ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:
>>
>>> The end result is that the wishes of the x86_64-using majority are the
>>> only ones that seem to matter in this community, and other users are
>>> frequently left in a bad spot.  This makes it increasingly unlikely that
>>> we'll ever gain a significant number of non-x86_64 users.
>>
>> This kind of rant is really unhelpful.  You’re shouting at someone who
>> *is* doing the work of keeping things running.
>
> I wasn't actually shouting, but in retrospect I can see how it came off
> that way.  I apologize for any hurt feelings that I caused.

I think the error is to suggest that people genuinely don’t care about
the issues.

Often they’re unaware, and sometimes they make suboptimal tradeoffs, as
in the PatchELF case, simply because the status quo is worse than the
suboptimal tradeoff.

> However, I do feel frustrated by the fact that it's considered
> acceptable in this community to leave non-x86_64 users with broken
> systems in the name of "moving things forward" for x86_64 users.

Like I write, it’s not “considered acceptable.”  That’s just not the way
it works.

There’s an implicit rule that we should not break any architecture
badly, but just like sometimes packages fail to build, sometimes there
are architecture-specific issues; and just like an unpopular package
that fails to build is likely to remain that way, an unpopular
architecture is more likely to have issues.

We don’t have to take it as a fact of life, though.  We can work
proactively to mitigate that, and support for those architectures in the
build farm, along with heads-up from overseers (like you’ve been doing
to great effect!) can greatly help.  It won’t bring, say, MIPS to the
level of support of x86_64, but it can reduce damage.

> I'm open to suggestions.  Do you see any solution to the problem of how
> to attract more non-x86_64 users, given our current policies?

Efraim, Danny, Vagrant, Julien, Mathieu, etc. have done a lot of work
fiddling with ARMv7 and AArch64.  We should encourage that, and
providing timely substitutes for the arches is one way to do it, and
ultimately to attract more users and contributors.

Thanks,
Ludo’.