[Development] Proposing to add (CPU) architecture maintainers

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 3 August 2022 04:56:41 PDT Marc Mutz wrote:
> - ARM
> - x86 (Thiago would be the obvious candidate, if he's in for it)

I agree. I already do this anyway, so it's just formalising something that 
exists.

> - MIPS
> - POWER
> - RISC-V
> - S390
> - Sparc
> 
> I would expect maintainers to be comfortable approving[1] assembly code
> for their platform, work (or orchestrate work) towards feature-parity
> with Qt's x86 support, and ideally getting the architecture into our CI
> or else making sure locally that the architecture builds and tests pass.
> 
> [1] Maintainers need to be Approvers, but I think we can grow an
> architecture maintainer into a Qt project Approver, because I don't
> think we'll find arch maintainers for all archs from the current set
> of Approvers.
> 
> What do you think?

I think we're not going to find anyone for any of the other platforms in the 
short term. Maybe RISC-V because it's getting a lot of share-of-mind -- it's 
something that even I have an interest on (lack of hours in the day is the 
problem). And if we poke at Imagination folks we can get someone to review 
MIPS code. Interestingly, if you go to mips.com right now, the big banner is 
about RISC-V...

POWER and S/390 are very IBM-specific. They're still active, but I don't think 
we have much relevance in that market. And Sparc has ceased being active. For 
those three I don't think we can hope to expect any kind of performance 
improvements. And since we don't have them in the CI at all, we can't even 
confirm they still build. I think they will go to the "we'll accept patches" 
bin, as opposed to Alpha patches.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Cloud Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering