Public SourceMage Discussion List

[David Kowis <dkowis AT shlrm.org>]

Jeremy Blosser (emrys) wrote:
> 
> I don't *want* to see us regress by dropping support either, but I think in
> reality we already have dropped support, at least temporarily.  It seems
> pretty apparent by now we don't have the resources to cover all the tasks
> we've established for ourselves in the timelines we want to reach.  We need
> to decide if the higher priority is keeping ppc support OR holding to a 1.0
> in the next 4-5 months and just getting that done by the ISO roadmap.  As a
> matter of simple fact we won't manage both.
> 
> We need a decision on this.
> 

The majority of our users are on i486 compatible systems. I've
personally only heard requests for ppc ISO's from afrayedknot and
sandalle. Sandalle has mentioned that since we "officially" support it,
we should have one (Forgive me if I recall incorrectly.) I believe that
it would be better to forge ahead with x86 ISOs over ppc support. PPC
support can be added later once the x86 iso has matured. The scripts
will support doing a ppc build, but there are complications with ppc
that are slowing us down. And a lack of testing, which I'm partly to
blame for. I've got a perfectly good ppc on a table in my computer room
that I'm using to test. I could probably sacrifice more time to test
than I have been, however, I'm not a PPC guru so when I test and
encounter problems on the PPC I have no clue how to hack past them. PPC
is completely new to me. We've gotten a shotgun test ISO that tests out
booting of kernels, which seems to be the major hurdle with the PPC,
once we get past that, the rest of the ISO /should/ be fine and the
generation scripts do put together a working installation CD.

What all my rambling boils down to is:
If we forge onward with sweeping changes to the installer and only
implement them in x86 for now, I don't believe that it will be difficult
to get a ppc iso in the future. After the installer and process matures
enough, we can add in the modifications to make PPC work 100%. Right now
we've got issues with the scripts and the installer that I think are
probably more important. I believe we're pretty darn close to having a
working 0.9.5 PPC iso, so if the kernel issue proves to be the only
problem, then we'll have a 0.9.5 PPC iso and we'll attempt generation of
the newer versions as well. If more issues arise and it starts to bog
down again, then it shall drop to a lower priority.

I hope everyone can understand my position on this and realize that I'm
not saying this because I don't care to have a PPC ISO, it's quite the
opposite, I'd love to have a PPC ISO, and a sparc iso, and an x86_64
ISO. But there's not enough resources to devote to this currently.
There's truly only one person doing development in the Cauldron Team.
I'm not a l33t bash programmer. I can do some things, and I learn a bit
more every time, but Karsten is the driving force behind the code. It's
only him. One person.

PS: sorry no gpg sig, I just got SourceMage installed and I've not
copied over my keys yet :)

David Kowis
ISO Team Lead