Including the fedora release engineering list and Peter Robinson who is the lead for secondary arches.
Thanks.
I suggest you subscribe to the rel-eng list so you post there too.
Given how long it has been since there was a Fedora SPARC port I think the best bet at this point will be bootstrapping the arch. We have scripts available for doing so from the bringups of armv7hl, aarch64 and ppc64le. I would strongly suggest that 32 bit support is dropped on the floor and only sparc64 is done. we have removed 32 bit from s390, ppc and not done it for aarch64. I am looking at ways to remove it for x86 arches.
What we did in LFS was to bootstrap in 64-bit only and then later we added multilib support in GCC and a glibc.sparcv9 so people could build and run 32-bit programs. We changed the .spec files and other scripts (including yum) so sparcv9 (the 32bit one) is a subarch of sparc64.
In SPARC it is important to keep 32-bit capabilities, as a big amount of programs out there have not been ported to 64-bit.
By "big ammount of programs" I presume you mean proprietary as opposed to open source programs that can generally just be recompiled with minor changes (I've done a number of bootstraps), if it's the later I suggest spending time fixing those. We're actively moving to deprecate multilib from Fedora so that basically means that any new boot straps should not be using it. Basically you're going to have to do a LOT of convincing me that it's needed! I'm not convinced.
Where can we find these bootstrap scripts?
I think there's another package in the wiki, I don't have time to dig atm, this was the overview that was done for ARMv7 hfp.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Fedora15_HardFP_Bootstrap
We do not have as much documentation as there could be in bringing things up. There will need to be a koji hub setup, along with builders. I think I have actually closed the sparc list, so it would need to be reopened if I did.
Yes, the list is closed, I tried to subscribe but the mailman page is missing.
You will need to get fas[1] accounts as well as bugzilla[2] all the fedora packaging guidelines[3] apply. any patches needed should go upstream. kernel wise we follow very closely upstream.
I made a fas account already (jemarch) and I already had a bugzilla account at RH.
I requested access to the fedora-sparc group, but seems like I need to be "sponsorized". That group is described as a cvs group, so I guess that group will give us access to some VCS holding the .spec and source tarballs?
Not exactly, that's a group for access to all packages for arch maintainers, I'm not sure we're to that stage in the process as yet. If it's packaging of sparc specific packages they should be handled as part of the standard packaging process.
Personally I no longer have any sparc hardware at all, and given my workload am unable to spend time on the port, however I am happy to provide guideance and direction. You can find our architecture support definition and architecture info from [4] it is an area that does need some love.
Thank you! We will probably pester you with all kind of naive questions
There's also a "secondary arch" list that you might want to join.
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/secondary.lists.fedoraproject.or...
rel-eng@lists.fedoraproject.org