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:

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.

An alternative is for dependent packages to move to (or also accept) gpc, the GCC-based pascal compiler (wishlist bugs have been filed where appropriate).

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.

The Ada front-end to GCC is written in Ada (der!) and translates Ada into an internal GCC tree representation, which is then compiled with the usual GCC back-end. It seems we cannot get away with doing the initial translation of the Ada parts on some other machine and transporting that to armel to do the final compilation because [http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-11/msg00746.html header files and even some Ada package specs are system dependent].

Porting appears to require making an x86->ARM gcc/gnat cross-compiler, then if that compiler seems to work on small Ada programs, using that to cross-compile a native ARM Ada compiler, then using that to build the Debian package. This should only need doing for one of the versions to be able to create both Debian packages, modulo any system dependent modifications to header files and package specs.

No Ada binaries site or other operating system distribution that supports ARM (NetBSD) provides precompiled gnat binaries for ARM.

Dependent source packages:

Interesting sites:

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.

Dependent source packages:

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

php5

Version 5.2.3-1+armel's architecture-dependent binary packages are available in armel unreleased. Unfortunately, the current version is 5.2.4-2 and its architecture-independent binary packages are included in armel unstable and are uninstallable because they require matching versions of the architecture-dependent components.

The current mainstream version, 5.2.4-2, fails to build on armel, saying:

checking build system type... Invalid configuration `arm-linux-gnueabi-gnu': machine `arm-linux-gnueabi' not recognized
configure: error: /bin/sh ../config.sub arm-linux-gnueabi-gnu failed

but no bug has been filed.

Its build dependencies cannot currently be installed because it requires libaprutil1-dev and libdb4.4-dev, libaprutil1-dev depends on libdb-dev and libdb-dev and libdb4.4-dev conflict. [http://bugs.debian.org/460562 bug] filed against package db.

Libraries

dietlibc

Needs upstream support for ARM EABI, see [http://bugs.debian.org/459482 Bug #459482].

Dependent source packages:

freetds

MS SQL and Sybase client library needs armel patches; the patches attached to [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=441736 bug #441736] are no usable because they contain a lot of machine-generated noise. See comments in the bug report for what needs resolving.

The build currently dies saying:

./debian/dh_makeshlibs -a -Xtdsodbc
dh_makeshlibs: Compatibility levels before 4 are deprecated.
Error: added symbols in libtdssrv.so.2: Base        __aeabi_f2ulz
Please update the library manifest at ./debian/dh_makeshlibs line 255.
make: *** [binary-arch] Error 255

because EABI floating point symbols are being exported.

A version of its binary packages are currently available in armel "unreleased".

libhdf4

Hierarchical Data Format library, needs g77->gfortran patches including and uploading. See [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=456297 bug #456297]

Its binary packages are currently available in armel "unreleased".

libidn

Implementation of IETF IDN specifications

Its binary packages 1.1-1+armel are currently available in armel "unreleased" but no bug has been filed; the current mainline version 1.1-1 builds unmodified on armel and the build daemons say it has built and been installed. However it is not in armel unstable (so what are the modifications in 1.1-1+armel?)

python-numeric

Numeric Extensions to Python

Binary packages for 24.2-7 are currently available in armel "unreleased"; the current unstable version is 24.2-8.

A proper build is waiting for the build dependency, refblas3-dev, to become available.

Applications

kernel-package

[http://bugs.debian.org/425971 Bug 425971] blocks automatic building of the Linux kernel packages. Fixes have been applied; waiting for the mainline version subsequent to 11.001 to be uploaded (check [http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/kernel-package here] to see whether this has happened yet).

qemu

Processor emulator. Requires gcc-3.4 because it compiles machine code into C fragment, munges the assembly language and then assembles them. In late 2006, at least, it didn't understand gcc-4 output and so needed gcc-3.4 at runtime. Upstream, an ARM port of QEMU is being tested but is not reliable yet.

Suggested solution: Not-for-us

strace

System call tracer.

Binary packages for version 4.5.15-1+armel are available in armel "unreleased".

The armel-fixing [http://bugs.debian.org/360152 bug #360152] has been applied and uploaded and the new version 4.5.15-1.1 of the package should be rescheduled for building.

subversion

Binary packages for version 1.4.4dfsg1-1+armel are available in armel "unreleased"; the mainline version is 1.4.4dfsg1-1. No bug has been filed.

Its build dependencies cannot currently be satisfied for the same libdb-dev reasons that block php5 (see above).

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.