[CentOS-devel] CentOS-5 on i586

Karanbir Singh mail-lists at karan.org
Mon Apr 7 15:34:01 UTC 2008


Johnny Hughes wrote:
>>> But surely we should not forget the basic essential of the CentOS 
>>> Project - it's equivalence to Upstream's EL. If Upstream support an 
>>> i586 in their EL 5 then, yes, CentOS should.
>>
>> I very strongly disagree with that statement. We do lots of things 
>> that upstream dont - and there is no reason why we cant expand on 
>> that. After all CentOS is not driven by a commercial end game ( as 
>> upstream is ), were doing things here that we want to, as a community.
> 
> Actually ... I don't personally see it as that at all.  We still want to 
> minimize changes and i think Alan's comments are correct.

So should we then stop doing all the other things we do now ?

> Right, and we may do it, however if we do it, it will be because there 
> is a growing market and it has no impact on the i686 distro.

If someone wants to step up and say he has a use for something, that 
does not impact another other community and works off the source base we 
are already working with, thats reason enough for me.

> And the act of modifying anaconda in that way DOES go against what 
> CentOS main goal is (a perfect rebuild of sources).

I disagree. I dont see any mention of i586 being rolled into the main 
distro, so what would lead you to assume that ? I already cleared that 
in my last email about i586 being an alternative installed. I already 
plan on creating one for CentOSPlus and atleast one more for the added 
drivers one with 5.2 release.

Creating an additional install set isnt that much of work, and if it 
adds value and makes the distro usable for larger number of people, I 
see no harm in doing that.

>> Besides you just completely marginalised the work done for things like 
>> the LiveCD, ServerCD's, the entire Plus and Extra repos etc.
> 
> I also did not read it like that. All those things are NOT changing 
> anything in the main distro, but are adding on to it.

thats also not true. There is plenty of stuff in the livecd that changes 
the way the main distro works, there is also plenty of stuff in the Plus 
repo that is a direct patch ( with no version change ) on packages in 
the distro, including the Kernel.


> But that might be the argument.  For example, we are probably not going 
> to add Gnome 2.22 into centos-5 for precisely that reason :D

I have zero problem if someone steps up to say that they would like to 
build gnome-2.22 for CentOS5 and host it as a sub-repo for the users who 
want it. I am not going to do it myself, and am quite sure about that :D

>> i586 support on CentOS5 was always meant to be an 'alternative' 
>> install mechanism.
> Right ... so all in all, I though Alan's comments were positive and not 
> negative.

perhaps, but he missed the whole point. Which is why the clarification 
from me.


> Either way though, the real issue is that we might provide i586 support 
> as an addon feature if it looks like i586 is required for new projects 
> .. but the support may be broken at times since upstream does not ensure 
> their source compiles with that "--target i586" switch.

Which is why it wont be a part of the main distro, and why there would 
be a need for someone to manage / maintain that tree. There is very 
little that actually builds as --target 686 anyway, most of the packages 
are built with --target 386. however, someone still needs to verify that 
it works on i586.

We do know that the stock the distro builds from, installs and works 
fine on i586 ( Fedora support everything, including selinux and home 
grown patches on i586 )

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq



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