This page tracks the problems with individual packages in the Debian armel port.

When a package has built in sid, please remove its entry from here.

About 90% of the repo is built for armel. The bulk of the remaining packages either:

?TableOfContents

arm/armel inconsistencies

Joey Hess says in [http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2007/12/msg00038.html a message to debian-arm@lists.debian.org]

"The following packages build-depend/conflict with something on arm, but not on armel. Most of these are of the form "[long list of arches including arm]" or "[!arm]" and obviously just need armel added to the list. Some of these may already have bugs filed due to FTBFS on armel."

Please investigate, resolve and remove from this list:

Bugs have been filed against:

Languages

fpc

Free Pascal compiler, a.k.a. fp-compiler. Exists in sid for arm, i386, amd64 and powerpc. Requires itself to compile itself and contains cpu-specific code generators: the arm one may or may not work unmodified on armel. Porting it means cross-compiling it, installing the cross-compiled version and using that to build the package, as well as possibly modifying its code generator for EABI.

Dependent source packages:

Dependent binary packages not enabled on armel: libhdate-pascal.

gcc-3.4

ARM EABI support was done for gcc-3.4 by CodeSourcery and published as source, but the changes were never backported into the mainline gcc-3.4.

gcc-3.4-dependent source packages:

gcc-3.3-dependent source packages:

g77

G77, the GNU Fortran 77 compiler, was not continued past gcc-3.4. From gcc-4, there is a separate "gfortran" program.

Missing binary packages are g77, libg2c0 and libg2c0-dev.

Colin Tuckley is tackling the fortran issues and says:

In most packages and quite a few simple libraries the only change is
replacing g77 with gfortran in the Makefile. Unfortunately the way some
things are done and in particular some floating point stuff the
implementation is different enough to cause problems. Not difficult to solve
problems, but things that need looking at and fixing.

Dependent source packages, and source packages that in turn depend on those:

As an alternative to g77, some packages will accept the pseudo-package "fortran77-compiler" which is also provided by "fort77", a wrapper for the Fortran-to-C translator, which already exists in armel. Others will accept the pseudo-package "fortran-compiler", which does not exist at all (gfortran provides "fortran95-compiler".)

gnat

The GNU Ada translator. Requires itself to compile itself. Not provided on ARM old-EABI either.

There are two gnat packages: gnat-4.1 and gnat-4.2.

Dependent source packages:

gobjc

GNU Objective C compiler, part of GCC, is explicitly disabled for armel, but works on arm.

Interestingly, the gobjc++, gobjc++-4.1 and gobjc++-4.2 binary packages can be built and are available on armel, though they cannot be installed because they require libobjc2 and the corresponding gobjc packages to run.

Dependent source packages:

of which the gnustep items block 70 other source packages (i.e. the rest of ?GnuStep)

gdb would require gobjc, but it is currently set to build without it on armel.

gobjc is disabled for armel

In the debian package in debian/rules.defs:

 ifeq ($(DEB_TARGET_ARCH),armel)
   with_objc := disabled for armel
 endif

and in gcc-4.1 and gcc-4.2's ./configure

  arm*-*-linux-gnueabi)
    noconfigdirs="$noconfigdirs target-libffi target-qthreads"
    noconfigdirs="$noconfigdirs target-libjava target-libobjc"
    ;;

Enabling it in these two places in vanilla gcc-4.2.2 results in a build failure

/home/martin/arm/gcc-4.2.2/libobjc/exception.c: In function '__gnu_objc_personality_v0':           /home/martin/arm/gcc-4.2.2/libobjc/exception.c:173: error: '_URC_FATAL_PHASE1_ERROR' undeclared (first use in this function)         

libobjc was disabled in GCC for ARM-EABI in 2005 when the -gnueabi patches went in [http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2005-09/msg00948.html because ARM uses its own unwinding routines]. At the time, libffi and libjava were disabled too (as is still the case in Debian sources - see above) but these two have since been resolved in mainline GCC - see [http://www.busybox.net/lists/uclibc/2007-May/017971.html Fix ARM EABI signal unwinding, May 2007], [http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java-patches/2007-q3/msg00091.html Enable gcj on ARM EABI, July 2007] and [http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/2007-08/msg00018.html Unwind_backtrace for ARM EABI, August 2007]. Similar unwinding strategies may work for libobjc.

Interestingly, GNUStep [http://amstradstuff.free.fr/maemo/gnustep.html has been made to work on Maemo], cross-compiled using the Scratchbox version of gcc-3.4 derived from Code Sourcery 2005q3.

mono

Mono CLI (.NET) runtime. Is built and included in the repository, but has [https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=MONO80024 a bug], which causes the build of any package that uses it to fail.

Fixed in CVS; awaiting new upstream release. ~40 packages waiting.

(*) Arch-independent package unusable because of runtime dependency

Applications

qemu

Processor emulator. Requires gcc-3.4 because it compiles machine code into C fragment, munges the assembly language and then assembles them, but doesn't understand gcc-4 output. It has also not been ported to work on ARM.

Suggested solution: Not-for-us

varkon

CAD system. Needs gcc-3.3 to build because of -fwritable-strings in Makefiles. The latest upstream version removes this need [http://bugs.debian.org/453009 Bug #453009]. Debian packages of the new version [https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/varkon-discuss/2007-December/000410.html are now available] but it is currently orphaned and needs a Debian sponsor for it to upload.