ocaml uses inline asm for garbage collection and similar things. This inline asm does not exist on PPC64, therefore ocaml can't build (and things that depend on it can't build.) Something like: ExclusiveArch: alpha armv4l %{ix86} ia64 ppc sparc seems appropriate, looking at the .S files in the asmrun dir.
This is something that should go into http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/OCaml and/or http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/OCaml BTW, this affects only the native compiler? One could build on ppc64 without the native compiler. However this would become quite maintenance intensive.
As posted in private e-mail to Gerald, I'm working on a patch (now with the help of David Woodhouse) to get ocaml building with native ppc64 support.
(In reply to comment #0) > ExclusiveArch: alpha armv4l %{ix86} ia64 ppc sparc There is x86_64 missing in this list, and in the devel spec you use "ExcludArch: ppc64". Can you please add the correct information of what should be added to the spec to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/OCaml ? And maybe adjust the Summary of this and the cloned bugs? Otherwise this is pretty confusing.
For reference: I got ocaml building and seeming to work fine on PPC64. My work is at git://git.infradead.org/~dwmw2/ocaml-ppc64.git -- see http://git.infradead.org/?p=users/dwmw2/ocaml-ppc64.git;a=summary The compiler was self-hosting and all tests seemed to be working fine, so I built a bunch of other packages. I found a SEGV in freetennis though, and never got round to debugging it. Building other packages would be interesting -- either they'll work fine, or if they don't they may turn out to be easier to debug. Packages at ftp://bombadil.infradead.org/pub/ocaml/
ocaml-3.10.1-2.fc9 built for ppc64 in rawhide. Let me know if you find any problems with it.
Out of curiosity, will this change be back-ported to F-8/7?
I think we need to rebuild all ocaml packages when we change the ocaml compiler, so probably not. I suppose we could add the ppc64 support in CVS, so that it's there just in _case_ we have to rebuild everything for F8. That's up to the package maintainers though.