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
