Re: ppc64el porter situation
On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 09:06:14AM -0200, Breno Leitao wrote:
> Hello Adrian,
Hi Breno,
> Let me share my view as the only DD listed as ppc64el porter.
thanks for your reply.
Just to state it explicitely in case that was not clear, I do not have
any problem with you personally or the ppc64el port in general.
I am just saying that I see a risk for the ppc64el port in the
unlikely case that IBM makes a sudden move away from PowerPC
during the lifetime of stretch.
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 10:50:01PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > Is a DM enough, if the only DD gets killed by a car [2] the day after
> > the release of stretch?
>
> The other DM is in the process of becoming a DD[1]. This might reduce
> the truck factor by half.
>
> [1] https://nm.debian.org/person/frediz
That's good news.
> > Second, all 4 committed porters seem to be employees of IBM.
> >
> > What happens if for whatever good or bad reason IBM decides in 2018
> > or 2019 to go away from ppc64el, and all 4 committed porters get fired?
>
> I understand your point here. ppc64el architecture is IBM's current and
> future focus. ppc64el is also planned for POWER9 and beyond. While it's
> hard to predict what future business decisions IBM may make, we believe
> the future of ppc64el and OpenPower systems looks good.
>
> There are many other distros that support ppc64el at this moment, as
> Ubuntu, Fedora, SLES, RHEL and others coming. So, your point is not
> Debian specific, but, generic to the Linux ecossystem.
Debian is in a different situation, the porters of these distributions
are likely employed by the company behind the distribution and not
by IBM.
> > The wording of the porter commitment is already limited to "I intend
> > to", and there is the single point of failure that one business
> > decision by IBM might reduce the number of porters immediately from 4
> > to 0.
>
> Right, since ppc64el machines are not desktop/personal machines, it is
> harder to get porters, compared to more pervasive architectures, as amd64.
> I hope to have more DD porters in the future, as ppc64el become more
> prevalent.
>
> lso, there are many other hardware manufactors and partners that relies
> on Linux for the Power platform[1]. In my opinion, the Power platform is
> bigger than IBM at this moment.
>
> [1] http://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo#Companies_supporting_the_project
That's also an impressive list of companies, isn't it?
When the one company that mattered switched to a different platform,
the whole platform collapsed immediately.
The whole Power platform also seems to be mostly around IBM.
>...
> On the other side, if there is a requirements for being a porter that
> says that the porter might be able to fix difficult issues on kernel and
> toolchain, then it is a different story. I do not believe that this
> requirement exists.
>....
It is not a requirement for every porter, but that skill is required.
Debian got burned in wheezy in the sparc port when no porter was
available to fix a broken kernel after the release.
That was an embarrassment to the Debian stability and quality that noone
wants to ever see again.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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