Ben Hutchings wrote:
It increases the risk of armv7 code and code with alignment problems in packages slipping in to armel unnoticed.The other option that has been suggested repeatedly is to put armel chroots on ARMv7 hardware. Unaligned accesses behave differently on v7, but they weren't consistent between different v5 implementations (http://www.heyrick.co.uk/armwiki/Unaligned_data_access) so I don't think this is critical.
Of course the problem of code that won't run on the minimal version of an architecture slipping in unnoticed is not unique to armel and it seems to me like it's something we may have to live with to get build hardware with sufficient ram in future. Are the marvell boards used to build debian armel still available? I couldn't find any evidence they were when googling and i've never seen any other armv5 hardware with sufficient ram to make a sane buildd.