shared memory problem on armel

peter green plugwash at p10link.net
Thu Feb 7 19:31:57 UTC 2013


Ben Hutchings wrote:
> The wilful incompatibility of Debian derivatives
Raspbian IS compatible with debian armhf in the sense that if your 
hardware supports it you can mix debian armhf packages and raspbian 
packages. In fact that is how raspbian was built in the first place.

Precedent both within debian itself and with other derivatives is that 
architecture names only change if the ABI is changed. As such I belive 
it is correct for raspbian to retain the armhf architecture name.

>  should not restrict what Debian does.
I don't think debian should make technically inferior choices just to 
help derivatives. OTOH I don't believe this is such a case. Where 
possible IMO it's better to check for what you really care about 
directly than check for some proxy for it.

In the long term I'd like to open a discussion about how the situation 
for derivatives that rebuild debian with different but ABI compatible 
compiler settings can be improved. The current debian/ubuntu soloution 
of having teh "debian" build system in quite a few source packages 
(mostly but not entirely variants of the gcc package) detect whether 
debian or ubuntu is being used based on a mixture of explicitly looking 
for ubuntu and looking for codenames and making complex descisions based 
on that isn't scalable to more derivatives and has left nasty bugs in 
the past. The current raspbian soloution of modifying every source 
package that builds a native code compiler is a PITA and breaks 
multiarch debian/raspbian combinations but that IMO is a discussion for 
after wheezy release.





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