Would there be any legal or technical trouble with putting ccc-compiled packes in the debian repository?
Several comments here... I'd love to see some packages built with ccc but fear it's not really practical for Debian as a whole for reasons others have stated.
There's the issue that ccc / cxx has gotten harder to get recently ... you have to *deserve* to get the RPMs, with your reason approved by a human. And evidently "aw, c'mon I used to work with you guys" is not a good enough reason. I'd say this software is (unfortunately) slowly becoming less free.
Any C++ code is hopeless -- AFAIK, cxx does not conform to the new name mangling/ABI standard set by gcc 3.2 so once you touch something you quickly have to build all C++ packages with cxx.
Ccc does not support some of the gcc extensions, notably variable number of macro arguments. This issue (and others like it) is a killer for packages that use these features (thankfully, not many).
I think the best way to get some key packages built with ccc is probably to
a) build them yourself orb) clear binary redistribution with HP, then set up an outside-Debian apt archive with these packages
You might get the libtool maintainers to accept your patches for redistribution -- there's nothing inherently non-free about them, and would make this task easier. I tried to get the DEC C folks to do this (internal to Compaq) when I worked there, but they did not bite.
Then there's the fact that gcc3 generates far superior code for Alpha than gcc2 ever did -- and doesn't have the nagging optimizer bugs so '-O0' workarounds of the past on certain packages can go away.
-Doug