[zozbot234]

What are the changes to dpkg and apt? Are they being shared with Debian? Could this be used to address the pesky armel vs. armel+hardfloat vs. armhf issue, or for that matter, the issue of i486 vs. i586 vs. i686 vs. the many varieties of MMX and SSE extensions for 32-bit?

(There is some older text in the Debian Wiki https://wiki.debian.org/ArchitectureVariants but it's not clear if it's directly related to this effort)

[Denvercoder9]

Even if technically possible, it's unlikely this will be used to support any of the variants you mentioned in Debian. Both i386 and armel are effectively dead: i386 is reduced to a partial architecture only for backwards compatibility reasons, and armel has been removed entirely from development of the next release.

[zozbot234]

What you said is correct wrt. official support, but Debian also has an unofficial ports infrastructure that could be repurposed towards enabling Debian for older architecture variants.

[mwhudson]

> Could this be used to address the pesky armel vs. armel+hardfloat vs. armhf issue

No, because those are different ABIs (and a debian architecture is really an ABI)

> the issue of i486 vs. i586 vs. i686 vs. the many varieties of MMX and SSE extensions for 32-bit?

It could be used for this but it's about 15 years too late to care surely?

> (There is some older text in the Debian Wiki https://wiki.debian.org/ArchitectureVariants but it's not clear if it's directly related to this effort)

Yeah that is a previous version of the same design. I need to get back to talking to Debian folks about this.

[bobmcnamara]

This would allow mixing armel and softvfp ABIs, but not hard float ABIs, at least across compilation unit boundaries (that said, GCC never seems to optimize ABI bottlenecks within a compilation unit anyway)