Some of you have been following on IRC, some of you have noticed the ACCEPTED mails from dak on the mailing list, some of you may have noticed the recent closure of bug #1033658. For all the others, I am happy to share the good news:

riscv64 is now an official Debian architecture

If you don't believe it, just have a look at [1]. However before you rush to update your sources.list file, I want to warn you that the archive is currently almost empty, and that only the sid and experimental suites are available. The procedure is to rebootstrap the port within the official archive, which means we won't import the full debian-ports archive.

Therefore our next step is to build a minimal set of ~90 source packages using the debian-ports archive and then import them into the official archive. These packages will be signed with a special GPG key using debian-riscv@lists.debian.org as the email address, enabling easy tracking. This process has already started, hence the few ACCEPTED mails on the mailing list. It will probably take a few days especially given that sid is constantly evolving.

Once done, we'll point the build daemons to the official archive. In the meantime you can just continue to use the debian-ports archive on your devices.

[1] https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/sid/main/binary-riscv64/