I did a little investigation of this issue on Friday. I'm not too
familiar with gcl: it looks like it compiles via C, and the only
architecture-dependent parts are in a fork of binutils internal to the
gcl source tree.

Unfortunately gcl seems to be in a dormant state at present: the last
news on the website (http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/) dates from 2005.
Also the version of binutils used appears to date from around the same
time period, going by the ChangeLogs. Using a version of binutils that
old isn't a great idea for Thumb-2 for various reasons: many bugs have
been fixed since then, and e.g. the older version of binutils won't have
the Cortex-A8 erratum workaround implemented in the linker, which may
lead to problems sooner or later.

I'm not sure what it takes to update the binutils used by gcl to a
modern version: that might be the easiest fix (it's then kind of a
packaging issue, I guess), assuming the gcl version of binutils doesn't
have significant local changes (otherwise cherry-picking and backporting
changes would be necessary). It seems suboptimal to maintain a fork of
binutils like this though: if at all feasible, it seems like it'd be
better to use the "normal" version of binutils supplied with the distro.
That might entail pushing local GCL changes -- if there are any --
upstream.

-- 
gcl currently not built on armel, needed as a build-dependency
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/636977
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