Adding Matthias Klose, maintainer of 'binutils', to CCs. Log at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=982892.
This discussion has nothing specific to or1k. I suggest to move to https://wiki.debian.org/PackagingLessCommonBinutilsTargets. Can you describe the scenarios you want to avoid? The binutils-* are quite different from each other. Small wrappers like binutils-{bpf,or1k-elf,...} are Built-Using: binutils-source. As long as they build against latest binutils, there is no difference with building them from binutils.dsc. But if/when they FTBFS, the failure does not involve unrelated maintainers. On the other hand, some binutils-* packages keep an old copy the binutils source tarball, for example because the patches from the hardware vendor have not been rebased yet. The Debian maintainers know very well that this is not ideal, but in this case sharing the source package is simply not an option. [binutils.dsc] > even includes alpha, m68k riscv64 and sh4. I'd say that or1k is not > a stranger among these. As far as I understand, 'binutils' now only intends to support released Debian architectures, and these are historical exceptions. > binutils-ports (or similar) This would be 'or similar', as 'port' in Debian suggests 'hopefully soon a released architecture'.