Raspbian

Raspbian is a project to create a hard float port of debian for the Raspberry Pi and similar devices which use ARMv6 processors with VFPv2. The official debian armhf packages are built with ARMv7, VFPv3_D16 and Thumb2. So they are not suitable for the Pi and similar devices. To get arround this we have to change the compiler defaults (easy) and recompile everything (harder than it sounds).

Infrastructure has been set-up for building packages. We aim to stay as close to debian wheezy as possible but we will pull in packages from sid and/or make our own modifications when we deem it nessacery.

A chroot can be bootstrapped from a debian squeeze armel installation using the following commands (replace /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi with where you want your chroot).

debootstrap --arch=armhf wheezy /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi http://debian.raspbian.com/debian/
cd /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi
wget http://debian.raspbian.com/raspbian.public.key
chroot /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi
mount -t proc proc /proc
cat raspbian.public.key | apt-key add
apt-get update

Modified packages

Note: this list is incomplete

Source package	Changes	Reason	Status
gettext	fixed dependency scanning	package had incorrect dependencies	bug 670588 filed in debian
libxslt	fixed building with build-arch	package failed to build with build-arch	bug 666333 filed in debian.
elfutils	testsuite disabled	testsuite failed on plugwash's build system and package was needed	local hack, hopefully we can drop later.
openldap	patched smbk5pwd.c	compilation failed, added nmu	known bug 664930 filed in debian.
gcc-4.6	change compiler defaults	need to build binaries suitable for rpi	permanent raspbian change, not suitable for pushing upstream
	treat wheezy the same as sid	compiler built in wheezy was passing --as-needed to the linker which we don't want	bug 670821 filed in debian