Hi all, after a discussion on the #debian-arm IRC channell and talking with some other people it appears the age old issue of softfloat against hard float binary compatability has come up again.
It has been made quite plain to me by various ftp masters etc. that an archive dump (e.g. scrub every single package and rebuild them all with new ABI) is completely out of the question and would probably result in the ARM arch being dropped from the Debian archive. With this in mind I (and some other kernel hackers) have come up with a possible solution for the current ARM little endian port which may mean the big endian people can do their port with "better" default switches and will eventually mean little endian can transition to softfloat too. Its very simple solution to state (rather harder to implement) and would need buy in across the board, this is not something I am prepared to do alone! The ARM kernels, d-i, autobuilders etc. is enough for one person! What I suggest is the creation of a "hard" softfloat library...wait it isnt insane ;-) this would allow the compiler switches to be changed to compile everything with libsoftfloat. There would be no issue with backwards compatability because there would (continue) be no mixing of soft and hard float. Then at some point down the line when the archive has rebuilt itself (and all the issues with having packages linking against libsoftfloat as well a glibc have been sorted) we can offer a transition package to change the dynamic library over to the real soft float library. Its an idea, feel free to come up with something more elegant or we can continue to use hard float as now. -- Regards Vincent
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