My concern would be that without it being an official target from the start, we run the risk of brokenness being found late in the game. Does it seem possible to add an "official" designation to ARM (and i686 for that matter) if things prove to be working by whatever cutoff date we have? That would seem to put more impetus on the people doing the things you suggest without us declaring either of those architectures by default.
Yeah, I think that it would be an error to commit to it until there's been a demonstration that this is achievable - and the onus should be on the ARM people to demonstrate that. I don't want to end up with one of our first deliverables being a sub-par experience. If it can't run Shell reliably and with adequate performance then it buys us nothing to ship it.
I agree with this sentiment, but like Dennis I wouldn't want to see it excluded entirely because it wasn't discussed at the beginning.
I'm not as optimistic as some when it comes to viable accelerated graphics hardware on ARM in the F21 timeframe. If testing of Workstation ARM can't even begin until things are merged, and that happens at the tail end of the development window, I don't really want us to be stuck in the blocker/demotion game if it doesn't happen. Opportunistic "promotion" seems a decent compromise.
Not going to disagree.
There are two possible candidates of HW class that would (could) make Workstation a nice option on ARM in the timeframe of F-21 but as both are out of my control I'm not going to get excited until I have them working in front of me let alone be naive to throw the hat in the ring. We've got around 6 months until the release of F-21 if it's something that evolves into that in a reasonable time in the interim and the moving planets align at the right time with enough time I believe it's worth reassessment then.
Peter