Adding support for ppc64le.

[Sunidhi-Gaonkar1]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

Hi team, in reference to #3615, requesting to add ppc64le support.

Proposed solution

I was able to build gh-cli from source following the instructions mentioned in https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/trunk/docs/source.md. I was also able to test the binary succesfully. Attaching below the build and test logs for the same. gh-cli-logs.txt

I will raise a PR shortly. Thank you.

Additional context

We are working on supporting OpenSearch distribution for ppc64le architecture, which has a dependency on gh-cli. https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-build/issues/3122#issuecomment-1888049652

[williammartin]

Hi @Sunidhi-Gaonkar1, thanks for opening this issue.

As in #3615, I'm not sure that we can commit to supporting this because we don't have an environment to continuously test it on. While you might have successfully tested it locally (thanks!) we will be in the dark going forward with every change. We also lack a development environment should any issues actually occur. Additionally, with limited resources, if we did break it, I'm not sure that we would prioritise fixing it given the interest we've seen in having it supported so far.

I've labelled this discuss to chat with the team about what we want to do here. It's a valid and understandable request and I want to keep it open so that the community can express their desire for this support. It appears that in the meantime you can build from source.

Also going to tag @mgiessing on here since he opened the original request some years ago, and may have had thoughts since then.

[seth-priya]

Hi @williammartin thanks for your response !

Just wanted to mention a few things

• Access to a Power VM can be requested from https://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/request_hosting/ for builds / testing
• We can work on enabling the CI like was done here https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/pull/5645 for builds / packaging (just as an example of one of the communities of the work done by our team)
• Currently, we don't have native Power support in GitHub actions so we might not be able to provide an easy alternative for running unit tests and such but we are working towards a solution that can enable us to add that support in future. However, having said that, since, this is mostly all go code, based on my experience with building/validating go packages on Power, I really don't think that we will end up breaking anything specifically for Power (unless some go assembly code / optimizations are added)

@mgiessing your thoughts as well? Thanks!

[jauder-ho-nttd]

+1 for releasing a ppc64le binary

Maybe it can be tagged/labeled as unsupported but it would be helpful rather than having to build from source.

[williammartin]

Thanks for the extra support to help us prioritise. What's your use case @jauder-ho-nttd ?

[jauder-ho-nttd]

@williammartin Running ansible on a P10 LPAR as the controller and using GitHub for source control.

[runlevel5]

Any update on this? I have been building from source for a quite without facing any issue.

[williammartin]

Hey @runlevel5, thanks for chiming in. No real update since we closed https://github.com/cli/cli/pull/8612.

Always happy to revisit decisions as we get more information though. What's your use case?

[runlevel5]

@williammartin my usecase is basically just daily interaction with GitHub for work (which happens to be on a IBM POWER9-based workstation). AFAIK there are lots of education and big firms that use POWER-based hardware do utilise GitHub for application development collaboration.