partman's debian/rules contains this:
# has buggy support for dvh partitioning labels, slow
ifeq ($(ARCH),mips)
MENUITEMNUM=49
This gives partman a lower priority on mips because it's not really
usable on SGI machines. However, I have a faster MIPS board which
doesn't use DVH but msdos labels, so I'd very much like to use
partman. Is anyone working on better support for sub-arches?
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com