Why 'armhf' and not 'armv6hf' in repo's?

As Raspbian is especially built for ARMv6 and Hard Float, and that is not compatible with other ARM architectures like ARMv7, why isn't it's repository called "armv6hf" instead of just "armhf"?

With only "armhf" you can't see if it's ARMv6 or ARMv7 or another ARM architecture, right?

Code: Select all

Get:9 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/main armhf Packages [7,378 kB]
Get:10 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/contrib armhf Packages [23.3 kB]                                                             
Get:11 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/non-free armhf Packages [47.3 kB]                                                           
Get:12 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org wheezy/rpi armhf Packages [14 B]


Maybe its instructions are a sub-set of later architectures and so binaries work with more than one type of processor?

[plugwash]

A couple of reasons

Firstly debian armhf and raspbian armhf binaries are compatible, while you can't run a mixture of them on a Pi you can run a mixture of them on a device with an armv7 processor (indeed that was how we made raspbian in the first place). Precedent from both debian and ubuntu is that debian architecture names represent a CPU family/ABI combination, not a particular minimum CPU requirement.
Secondly changing the architecture name would have made the bootstrapping process considerablly more complex and increased the number of packages we needed to patch.

OK, thank you!