The way this package works is it diverts gcc, cc, g++, etc, with shell
scripts that, if the environment variable DEBIAN_BUILDARCH is set and
exported, call "gcc -m$DEBIAN_BUILDARCH". So with DEBIAN_BUILDARCH=pentium
set and exported, you build pentium optimized binaries, without it set, you
build normal i386 binaries.

It also specially interecpts dpkg's call to gcc --print-libgcc-file-name and
munges the result to that dpkg thinks the taget architecture is the value of
$DEBIAN_BUILDARCH

Why did I do it this way? There are alternatives after all. I could just set
CFLAGS or GCC, or I could place the shell script wrappers in a separate
directory and set the PATH to point to them when you want to build pentium
optimized stuff. The problem with all these ideas is that I can imagine
packages that would circumvent them.

It's a hack, but it works. I welcome a cleaner solution.