On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 6:15 AM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 12:43:36AM -0400, DJ Delorie wrote:
>
> > Stack protector is not a new requirement in Fedora. It's been part of
> > the distribution for years.
>
> xterm has been part of the distribution for years also, but it's not a
> release requirement.
The assumption has always been that all primary architectures embody the
same level of functionality, with the exception of fundamental
differences between the architectures. If things that are currently
supported by the primary architectures cease to be supported by the
primary architectures, that's a strong argument that they're not
fundamental to Fedora. For example, in the absence of hardware nx
support, I wouldn't argue that ARM should be forced to implement
execshield - both because it's fundamentally tied to 32-bit x86, and
because we've given up on supporting it. But yes, if ARM wanted to ship
without xterm while the other primary architectures supported it, I'd
say that that would be a blocker for shipping ARM as a primary
architecture.
I think assumption is part of the problem here, you're assuming
something that is different to the assumption of others but as it's
not documented anywhere it means that neither opinion is neither right
nor wrong.
I think what's been missed here is that the secondary
architecture
promotion guidelines were intended to be an addition to common sense
rather than a replacement for it. They didn't seek to be an exhaustive
list of things that had to be present for something to be a PA - they
were an attempt to shape out the grey areas. A primary architecture
should include everything that one could reasonable expect to be present
in Fedora, which includes security features.
And I agree that "common sense" is required here, we're not arguing
that security features should be ignored and we weren't ignoring them,
we made an assumption that because the kernel, the compiler options
were there that so was the glibc rather than a boiler plate code that
made all of the rest of the components essentially useless.
As for the common sense about the desktop I don't necessarily agree
that while the gnome desktop is the default that it's an explicit
requirement. There's 4 million XOs shipping Fedora (both x86 and ARM)
that don't ship with gnome3 as well as no doubt millions of instances
of cloud images that don't have a requirement of a desktop yet we
still call them Fedora... Fedora with a requirement for a desktop or a
single desktop option I think is a thing of the past and while I would
like to support it I don't believe it's common sense to have it as a
blocker.
Peter