Thanks Filipe for initiating the discussion.

Dan Horák <dan@danny.cz> wrote on 2015-06-23 02:31:23 PM:

> On Tue, 23 Jun 2015 13:52:41 -0400
> Filipe Miranda <fmiranda@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > This can be addressed maybe by IBM, by offering build systems to help
> > developers test their packages.
>
> Ack, that's something for IBM, from Red Hat side it would require
> providing RHEL for System z subscriptions to such devel systems.
> Currently we have one public guest running Fedora available to the
> community, so it should be solvable. In addition to real HW there are 2
> solutions capable running current Linux distributions under emulation.

Dan, could you elaborate on the emulation aspect? Do you mean IBM zPDT
and Hercules? I am curious if you are using emulation in the build farm
today.

IBM is currently engaging open-source software companies to encourage
support for the platform. IBM partners can essentially get access to
hardware for development purposes at a discount.

For the community, we have a program called Community Development
System for Linux on z, whereby open source projects can sign up for
free access to Linux guests on our z Systems (for a limited time):

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/support/community.html

During registration, you can request a RHEL installation. I am not
sure whether it comes with a RHN subscription.

Other community hardware access options are now being considered, and
I hope something more streamlined can be announced soon.

> From the quality point of view we are able to build 90+ percent of 16k+
> packages in recent Fedora, so I don't expect many new issues related to
> running in EL environment. But I can be wrong and it is also a place
> where IBM engineers can step in :-) I would rather expect runtime issue
> than build time ones.

I would imagine that, when EPEL RPMs are built on z for the first time,
a small percentage of them could be broken. We have some experience in
porting and building for z, and can certainly assist the package
maintainers with debugging build-time problems.

> > > a) If we build packages for an arch, then every EPEL package gets
> > > built for it (except those with the ExcludeArch hammer)
> >
> > The idea is to start with what IBM thinks it will be good to have
> > there, then if the project gets traction, we can have feedback from
> > customers using bugzilla.

Unless build farm resource is a concern, I actually like the idea of
building all EPEL packages at once. Like Dan said, there probably won't
be many build issues. But yes, we could also supply a list of the more
important packages, to seed the repository.

> There are other questions like do we know that current content of EPEL
> will build, etc.
>
> And I also suppose we are talking about EPEL-7 (and up).

EL7 and up is a good start, although it would be really nice to support
EL6 as well; many people still have production systems running RHEL 6.


Regards, Bryan
--
Bryan Chan
bryan.chan@ca.ibm.com