[oi-dev] Where should SPARC go?

[Michal Nowak]

On 11/22/19 09:43 PM, Gary Mills wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 10:56:11PM +0100, Michal Nowak wrote:
>> On 11/17/19 10:39 PM, Gary Mills wrote:
>>> I have a series of questions to ask the members of this mailing list.
>>> I have information to share with you as well.  I already have partial
>>> answers to most of the questions, but I'd still like to hear from you.
> [...]
>> There were 7 contributors to the OpenIndiana/oi-userland repo (which is the
>> bulk of OpenIndiana development) with more than 10 commits for the 2019.10
>> release. I don't know how many OI users (be it long-term or accidental ones)
>> are out there for the same period of time but I guess it's in low hundreds.
> 
> I have no doubt that SPARC owners are in the minority.  My estimate is
> about 12 users and 6 developers.
> 
>> Although I consider Gary's OI on SPARC an interesting achievement, I doubt
>> there are enough potential users and developers to sustain any illumos SPARC
>> distro of the same (slow) pace of hipster development. E.g. looking at
>> SPARC-related work in illumos, it's only Peter who contributes significantly
>> to this area (mostly by removing entirely obsolete platforms and by ensuring
>> illumos actually builds - and that's, I am afraid, revealing).
> 
> That's partly because illumos already has SPARC support built in:
> Peter only fixes things in illumos that are broken.  I've submitted 14
> bug reports, with patches, to the OI project.  I'm aware that the
> patches need to be turned into PRs before OI developers will consider
> them.  Most of the bug reports are not SPARC-specific.  I did not need
> to submit any bug reports to the illumos project.

That built-in support is for > 10 years old platforms, for me that is 
indicative about interest in this platform. Given that illumos SPARC 
distros were not closely following illumos development, years of testing 
stuff which gets added is missing for SPARC.

> 
>> Given the tiny resources OI project has and can offer, I wish OI and
>> "OI"-for-SPARC were independent and related to each other in the same way OI
>> currently relates to OmniOS CE and pkgsrc, that is by sharing knowledge,
>> patches.
> 
> Full independance is a good way to cripple SPARC development.  OI
> source archives, Makefiles, and package manifests are used to build
> and publish OI SPARC packages, generally with no change.  It's OI all
> the way.  The only thing that will change is the list of components to
> build.  The package names are the same.  The package repository does
> not have to be hosted by OI, of course.
> 
> I've had a few offers of a build server with jenkins.  It will clone
> oi-userland periodically, and build packages from it.  Only the binary
> packages will be different from the x86 version.  The whole thing could
> be fully automated and will track OI pretty closely.  We are not there
> yet, but we will be.

Whatever the terminology on the projects relation, what I am really 
interested in is the OI amd64 development not being adversely affected.

Although I am not excited about it, I don't mind SPARC changes in the 
OpenIndiana GitHub projects (Makefiles, patches, .p5m files, ...), 
provided that OI does not guarantee anything for SPARC, including:

* we update a component which fails to build on SPARC, we don't retract,
* updated component's SPARC patch fails to apply and it's too 
complicated to fix it, we remove it for the time being and re-apply when 
SPARC developers come up with a fixed patch,
* we don't test that changes build the less work on SPARC

I don't think that's a great experience for SPARC re-builders from 
OpenIndiana/oi-userland.

Michal