Today, we have completed our first Britney run with mips64el enabled in testing. 
At the current time, the set of packages in mips64el are not very connected (and you probably cannot even install build-essential yet[1]). Hopefully this will change over the next few days. For now, Britney does not enforce installability of packages on mips64el in general, so do not expect the architecture to be stable at the moment.
Cheat sheet for package maintainers:
- Issues with builds (only) on mips64el are not blockers for testing migration (nor RC yet).
- Such bugs should be filed as “important” for now (unless they also affect a release architecture, in which case you should still make it an RC bug)
- Your package be an older version on mips64el compared to other architectures.
- Britney may decide to break your package on mips64el if it means something else can migrate on a release architecture.
We will slowly remove these special cases for mips64el as it matures in testing.
[1] Update on this: mips64el currently does not have a libc library yet, so build-essential is definitely not installable at the moment. It will hopefully migrate very soon.
Filed under: Debian, Release-Team
