arm eabi port, patches

[Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh@wantstofly.org>]

Hi,

More and more VFP-supporting CPUs are coming out lately, and it would
be nice to be able to use VFP on them in a sane way.  The existing
Debian EABI efforts have been taking a while, so November 24 last year
I started working on a from-scratch EABI port, sponsored by Applied
Data Systems (http://www.applieddata.net/)  Six and a half weeks later,
there's about 6000 debs built, and so far it all seems to work pretty
well.

I can't share the debs yet (internal and customer use only for now),
but I would like to get consensus on armel patches before I start
submitting them.

The first candidate is dpkg.  Guillem Jover's patch available here:

	http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2006/05/msg00032.html

changes DEB_HOST_GNU_{SYSTEM,TYPE} to have -gnueabi at the end.  I've
found that this doesn't work too well.  For example, util-linux does
stuff like this all over debian/rules:

	ifeq ($(DEB_HOST_GNU_SYSTEM),linux-gnu)
	MOUNTBINFILES  = mount/mount mount/umount
	MOUNTSBINFILES = mount/swapon mount/losetup
	endif

And ruby1.8 does:

	arch_dir  = $(subst linux-gnu,linux,$(target_os))

(which turns arch_dir into arm-linuxeabi instead of arm-linux-eabi.)

I asked Joey Hess, and he felt that there are probably more packages
that depend on linux-gnu than on having gnueabi, which makes sense.
The only packages that really need to know about gnueabi are binutils,
gcc and glibc, the rest should just be checking defined(__ARM_EABI__).

Opinions?


cheers,
Lennert