On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Steve Langasek
<vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> There is a way: for Debian armhf to re-target on v6 in a future release.
> That would break none of the existing installations and make Debian
> more Universal as per its manifesto.
Debian already has a perfectly good port capable of running on the Pi - the
armel port. So there's no difference in universality. But the Pi
enthusiasts didn't think this was good enough, and wanted one optimized for
their particular chipset.
Very true. Armel does indeed run fine. However, for certain applications having an armhf port such as Raspbian will make a big difference. One example is the Robot Operating System (ROS) by Willow Garage which is actively being ported to the Raspbian at this time. It includes a number of physics libraries and applications that process complex sensor data that will benefit greatly from a hardware floating point unit and the more efficient armhf ABI. The interesting thing is Willow Garage is choosing to initially port to Raspbian armhf rather Debian armhf because of the ubiquity and low cost of the Raspberry Pi. Also, the knowledge that the packages will run perfect fine on Debian armhf if someone chooses to do so.
Mike