On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 2:37 PM Adam Williamson
<adamwill(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Tue, 2019-07-23 at 13:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 12:39 PM Kevin Fenzi <kevin(a)scrye.com> wrote:
> > On 7/22/19 10:34 PM, Igor Gnatenko wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 4:31 AM Igor Gnatenko
> > > <ignatenkobrain(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > > Thinking about this even more, it should not be very hard thing to do:
> > >
> > > * Define new architecture in RPM/libsolv (let's call it
"haswell" or
> > > "x86_64modern")
> > > * Define set of capabilities it should have, write appropriate check
> > > in RPM/libdnf
> > > * Add new architecture in Fedora Koji
> > > * Once bootstrapped, create composes
> > > * At some point in future, merge this arch back to x86_64 and move
forward
> > >
> > > What do you think?
> >
> > Unless someone can show some kind of MASSIVE benefit, I'm not in favor.
>
> I think too often we focus on the technical implications (performance
> gain, etc) and sometimes don't consider wider aspects. So I'm curious
> what your view is. Can you elaborate on what kind of benefit you
> would view as warranting this?
>
> > It's a ton of duplication of effort, tons more disk space, tons more cpu
> > cycles wasted, a ton more mirror disk space, a ton more bandwith, etc.
>
> So let's look at this statement, for example. Everything listed is
> machine related, except the first part on duplication of effort.
> Machine related items are solvable with more machine resources. (That
> is not to be flippant, but it's far easier to solve than human
> impact.)
Well, sort of - except that, life being life, machines inevitably go
wrong. Fans give out and they choke. Builds mysteriously fail because
of some test flake or a neutrino hitting the CPU at just the wrong
moment or something. Disks go wonky. And all of these things get fixed
by...people. Adding an arch adds another arch worth of all those things
happening and needing to be fixed by someone.
Agreed. I'd like to frame the discussion less around "adding another
arch" and more around "adding a new thing", but you mostly correct. I
would suggest that there is this nebulous thing called "the cloud"
that mitigates a small part of that, but I also fully understand using
that magical machine resource presents its own challenges.
Also, we can't really solve the machine resources of mirrors.
Well, I
mean, I guess we *could*, but I doubt anyone in RH is going to sign off
on us buying a ton of expensive storage hardware and shipping it off to
random universities around the world...
Honestly, I'm less concerned about this. Why? Because anything new
like this does not immediately require the full weight of a mirror
system. The level of interest is likely to be small enough at the
start that we can and should approach it in a measured way.
> On the effort part, what if we structured it so it wasn't
immediately
> 2x the effort. That would indeed be poor. If we assume for a minute
> that we have the machine resources, we can certainly come up with
> workflows that facilitate something like this in a manner that doesn't
> cause a large human overhead. I'm actually thinking of other areas
> that would benefit from not exactly the new architecture approach as
> traditionally know, but a new target space that allows the Fedora
> project to do new things.
I agree that this would be possible, but it comes with the caveat that
the people who would likely get stuck with improving the workflows are
the same people currently being overworked by the bad workflows.
This makes the assumption that there is no influx of actual humans.
Given history, maybe that's a fair assumption. I think for anything
new to work, we'd need at least some way to add actual human
participants. Either by freeing up existing people, or bringing new,
interested people in.
The 'don't do a release for a year' proposal (or whatever
variations of
it were discussed) was supposed to help with that kinda thing,
but...that didn't happen. So, we're all still on the treadmills.
It didn't happen, but I'm seeing different approaches already being
taken to address similar issues. The current discussion around
dropping a number of apps, for example.
All of these things require a cost/benefit analysis for sure. That is
very hard, but it's also very healthy. Just doing the same thing
forever just gets you the same thing forever, right? I haven't been a
super-active Fedora participant very recently, but I'm encouraged that
the project is starting to look at things in new ways and evaluating
what is actually a valuable thing to do. I find it very exciting.
josh