Bug#982892: ITP: binutils-or1k-elf -- GNU binary utilities for the Open RISC 1000 processors

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Control: tags -1 + moreinfo

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 10:54:39AM +0100, Nicolas Boulenguez wrote:
> The maintainers of the 'binutils' .dsc package deliberately support a
> limited set of targets.  Outside this set, separate .dsc packages are
> recommended (even without patches) so that an issue affecting an
> architecture does not block all other ones.

That limited set even includes alpha, m68k riscv64 and sh4. I'd say that
or1k is not a stranger among these.

If that really is an issue, I strongly recommend not adding one binutils
package per architecture, but instead adding a binutils-ports (or
similar) package that collects the more exotic architectures. This would
nicely resemble the split already done for gcc (gcc-10-cross,
gcc-10-cross-ports). But really, sticking them in the main binutils
package makes things a lot easier for bootstrapping.

The major downside of having many of these binutils-* packages is that
they lag behind the main binutils. You keep running into bugs already
fixed in src:binutils, because those other packages are not reuploaded
as frequently. Not a hypothetical issue. I'm pained by it regularly on
the gcc side. The fewer source packages we have here, the better the
chances are of keeping them up to date.

I'm tagging the itp moreinfo for this reason.

Helmut