Re: armelfp: new architecture name for an armel variant

[Martin Guy <martinwguy@gmail.com>]

Hi
  if you make a new port name, remember that you'll have to submit
hundreds of requests for package maintainers to modify control files
and build scripts so that things are built for the new architecture
and in some cases so that all binary packages are produced for that
architecture.
   I remember that taking most of a year for the armel port and
persistent mail to package maintainers and provision of test machines
over ssh. It means changing every package that has an Arch: list
anywhere is its control file.
  Worse yet, some packages build their binary packages or not in an
arch-dependent way, and the only way to check that is to download and
unpack every source package and run through its contents with a
script.

   That is one argument for just calling it "armel" and hosting the
hard FPU variants in their own separate repositories. That way you'll
get a higher quality release thanks to all the QA that was done for
armel and you won't have to spend a year pestering dozens of DDs.
Although they were almost always cooperative (eventually) and usually
polite, no one was happy to have to modify their packages just to add
yet more arch names to the lists.
   Any mistake by users trying to mix the regular armel packages and
the hardfloat ABI ones would just fail immediately.

Just a thought

    M