From owner-freebsd-current  Sun Mar 14  6:34:22 1999
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From: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@iafrica.com>
To: current@freebsd.org
Subject: Proposal: Drop OBJLINK option
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 16:33:29 +0200
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Hi folks,

I have a proposal regarding the OBJLINK option; let's drop it.

Currently, OBJLINK breaks world when NOAOUT is undefined -- that is, for
the legacy build.  This is because making the objlink target for aout
libraries blows away the existing objlinks that have already been
created for building ELF libraries.

The result is that a.out libraries are installed where ELF libraries
should be, and their ELF counterparts aren't installed at all.

I've spoken to some folks who've been around a while (my FreeBSD mentor
and a colleague who's into NetBSD) and have an understanding of why the
objlink functionality exists... hysterical raisins only.

It was once useful, since there was a time when the only way to have
make build on some filesystem other than the one containing the source
was to use cross-device symlinks.

Those days are long gone. The ports mechanism has its own way of
handling this (WRKDIRPREFIX) and so does the base source tree
(MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX). So OBJLINK is simply tautologous.

If it were simply tautologous, there'd be no reason to remove it. But
since it's blowing up in people's faces (two PR's at least) and since we
have "a better way" that _doesn't_ blow up, I vote to retire the beast.

Diffs to do just this are attached to PR misc/8071. I've tested the
diffs through a buildworld+installworld, but would appreciated feedback
on a release build.

Thanks,
Sheldon.


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