[Development] Proposing to add (CPU) architecture maintainers

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Mittwoch, 3. August 2022 16:35:16 CEST Thiago Macieira wrote:
> 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.

Yeah most of the architectures except x86_64, aach64, armhf and wasm are all 
effectively unmaintained. I doubt we could find maintainers. The only frequent 
and reliable user I know of of the uncommon archs is Debian, and that is 
basically just compile testing it and opening bugs if it doesnt compile, and 
only for mips*, ppc64 and s390x. I have previously fixed fatal bugs in big 
endian handling, that nobody had reported for years.

Best regards
Allan