On 12/20/2010 10:54 AM, Matthias Klose wrote:
So, I'll build without Linaro on powerpc. Next we'll see regressions on ix86 and x86_64, which are not fixed, so stop building these architectures without the Linaro changes? Or build without Linaro on ix86 and x86_64? Or maybe be a bit more conservative what gets into the Linaro toolchain?
I'm not trying to take an extreme position; I'm really looking for an answer here. We've got something approaching 100 engineers doing ARM-oriented work in various components. They build on ARM, test on ARM, benchmark on ARM. They live ARM, they breathe ARM. I think it's likely they're going to break non-ARM, no matter how well-intentioned they are.
So, the question is what policies we should have pre-checkin (to validate other architectures) and post-checkin (when a problem is reported on another architecture). I don't think we have very good clarity there. I suspect that if more distributions start taking more technology from Linaro, we'll see this issue arise more and more often.
Correctness is a relatively easy case, but what happens when we see that a 10% performance improvement on ARM resulted in a 2% decrease on MIPS or 3% on x86? What commitment, if any, are we making to a distribution that cares about all of ARM, MIPS, and x86?
Thank you,