Ben Hutchings wrote:
Raspbian IS compatible with debian armhf in the sense that if your hardware supports it you can mix debian armhf packages and raspbian packages. In fact that is how raspbian was built in the first place.The wilful incompatibility of Debian derivatives
Precedent both within debian itself and with other derivatives is that architecture names only change if the ABI is changed. As such I belive it is correct for raspbian to retain the armhf architecture name.
I don't think debian should make technically inferior choices just to help derivatives. OTOH I don't believe this is such a case. Where possible IMO it's better to check for what you really care about directly than check for some proxy for it.should not restrict what Debian does.
In the long term I'd like to open a discussion about how the situation for derivatives that rebuild debian with different but ABI compatible compiler settings can be improved. The current debian/ubuntu soloution of having teh "debian" build system in quite a few source packages (mostly but not entirely variants of the gcc package) detect whether debian or ubuntu is being used based on a mixture of explicitly looking for ubuntu and looking for codenames and making complex descisions based on that isn't scalable to more derivatives and has left nasty bugs in the past. The current raspbian soloution of modifying every source package that builds a native code compiler is a PITA and breaks multiarch debian/raspbian combinations but that IMO is a discussion for after wheezy release.