Hello Alan!
Yes :-) I can't remember any porting issue that was related to the CPU target. That play almost no role. The porting issues are all related to the environment (e.g. mintlib and it's Unix compatibility). I don't think there is any benefit for us just because Debian has a m68k distribution (it's just a Linux distribution like for every other target too).A fair comment, but "almost" is the key word. In packages such as GCC, binutils, gdb, and others there should be a benefit in using packages that have had wider testing on m68k distro's. They may well have patches specifically for m68k that we may not pick up if we use RPM's from an x86 architecture.
I never seen any patch that was related to the CPU target. The gdb for example (I ported it) stay on top of the libbfd.a. No CPU relevant things inside it (except maybe the register definition).
I said 'almost' because I can't say that there is never a relevant case. But I compiled a lot of rpms and the CPU target was never an issue for me (and all others as far as I know).
But, we can always pull those patches into an RPM. So it was just a thought. We can stick with RPMs.
I'm not against debian or the package manager. I use debian a lot myself. It's just we have tons of rpms. Recreating all of them as debian packages is a very extensive amount of work. I personally think we should spent our spare time for more interesting things :-)
Regards, Frank -- ATARI FALCON 060 // MILAN 060 ----------------------------- http://sparemint.org/ e-Mail: fnaumann@boerde.de