Date: 24 Mar 1999 11:16:43 -0500 From: Ian Lance Taylor <ian@zembu.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD FAQ and a.out Message-ID: <19990324161643.6912.qmail@comton.airs.com>
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In the FreeBSD FAQ at
http://www.FreeBSD.org/FAQ/FAQ225.html#227
you say
``Even though the a.out executable format has served us well, the
GNU people, who author the compiler tools we use, have dropped
support for the a.out format.''
As one of the GNU people--I'm the GNU binutils maintainer--I don't
think this is quite right, and it recently led to confusion on
gnu.misc.discuss. We never dropped support for a.out--it is supported
just as well as it ever was, and that includes complete support for
SunOS style shared libraries.
We did encourage people to move to ELF, because it is better. It
supports multiple sections, permits the alignment of those sections to
be set individually, and it provides shared library support that is as
good as SunOS and is easier to understand. Multiple sections permits
neat hacks like bash extracting the set of long options from the
executable, in order to option completion, in a reasonably portable
fashion.
From my perspective as the GNU binutils maintainer, the BSD folks
developed a lot of a.out support code which was never contributed back
to the GNU binutils. I would always have been happy to accept those
patches, but as far as I can recall, nobody ever seriously tried to
contribute them. So we didn't drop support for a.out; in the sense in
which you mean, we never had it.
I would appreciate if you could clarify this in the FAQ to avoid
future confusion.
Thanks.
Ian
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