On Sunday 29 December 2013 18:56:14 Mike Frysinger wrote:
> so to turn your base argument around, we shouldn't be limiting Gentoo to
> only support CHOSTs that also select ABIs uniquely.

also worth noting: we've been severely limiting ourselves as to the full range 
of possibilities.  when we say "ABI", we've largely been focusing on the most 
common aspect.  in reality, an ABI is defined by many more features like:
 - endian (little/big)
 - floating point (hard/soft/etc...)
 - ISA selection (mips1/mips2/mips3/mips4/... or i386/i486/i586/i686/... or 
sse1/sse2/mmx/3dnow!/...)
there are other aspects too, but these are the obvious ones that people are 
selecting every day.  people have one toolchain which can generate code for 
all of these things merely by flag selection, not different CHOST values.  in 
Gentoo we don't commonly support this as most people don't care, but it has 
been done before.
-mike