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Re: Debian EABI arm port name: armel



[ Resending as the initial mail on the 22th seems to have been lost or
  stuck somewhere. ]

Hi,

I'll reply here to the whole thread. Even if the tone of this mail was not
encouraging to do so.

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 11:03:35 +0200, Martin Guy wrote:
> > Lennert at least didn't see any problem in making armeb EABI in the future

> Except that people are already using the armeb repository for real
> work. If you EABIfy armeb we end up with two sets of Debian packages
> floating around called "armeb" that are binary incompatible, the
> avoidance of which was the whole reason for making a new arch at all.

It was for the current Debian arm, as it is an official arch. We are
*not* going to break binary compat in any Debian arch if it implies
non smooth transitions/upgrades.

> "armel" was the worst choice of them all (except maybe the ones with
> hyphens) because "armeb" already exists and means something else.
> Either we are prevented from making a bigendian ARM EABI repository,
> or we have to throw away the existing armeb repository, which I gather
> people are using for real work.

Moving armeb to EABI should be done before getting it into Debian if
at all, and as it is not official yet and ususally those do not have
any kind of guarantee on binary compat or release status compared with
official Debian arches, I don't see any better time.

Also by creating yet another arch sidewise to armeb, will imply having
to maintain *both*. The arm port is lacking people already in Debian as
to having to maintain *4* ports now. But if you (and a group of people)
is willing to maitain it until there's a clean upgrade path from armeb
to armeb+eabi then we could reconsider (that could imply years). But
I'd strongly suggest you to talk with the armeb developers, which
supposedly are the ones who are going to do the work, and which seem
the ones most appropriate to do this kind of decision.

About arm and armel being confusing, the idea is to create the new
port, create a transition plan and after we can upgrade from the
former to the later smoothly, ditch the oldABI port after one release
and replace it in Debian as the only arm little endian arch.

About the arch names:

* hyphens are bad, mainly because right now they imply os-cpu, so it
  would make more difficult to get a consistent namespace, in case of
  linux, right now it's implicit (linux-i386).
* the arch name does not have to match any real cpu or abi, we just
  need a way to map it to the GNU triplet.

regards,
guillem



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