> you have to bear in mind that "future porting" *used* to be very > uncommon an occurrence (as if doing it 14 times is "uncommon") > > but with the massive explosion in compiler options for ARM processors > alone, the process of "porting" now becomes a massive headache.
Really? AFAIK the only really interesting option (soft vs. hard float ABI) has already been done. I guess we might want a big-endian port eventually, but all the other options are just optimizations and fully binary compatible with the current ports. i.e. you can start from a full armel/armhf system and incrementally rebuild optimized packages from there. No reason to bootstrap from scratch. The real problem is that dpkg can't handle multiple variants of the same package for the same architecture. Worst case you invent a "new" port and --force-architecture install the armel packages. Cross-compiling a base system from scratch may still be an interesting facility. However if you're doing that then IMO it's also reasonable to want to cross compile everything. I don't believe bootstrapping of new ports is sufficient justification for this. I'd expect that any vaguely automated system for such builds would bitrot rapidly, and require significant maintenance. Paul -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
