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From: Dave Glowacki <dglo@SSEC.WISC.EDU>
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To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Cc: JSINNOTT@pomona.edu, questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Linux Compatibility 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 05 Feb 1996 15:13:04 MST."
             <199602052213.PAA00375@phaeton.artisoft.com> 
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Date: Mon, 05 Feb 1996 16:29:23 -0600
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> So contact Soren Schmidt and get his ELF patches.

I'm using my FreeBSD machine as the home version of my workstation; I
don't really need much in the way of Linux support (Doom is still a.out
and I get paid to write color X apps so I avoid Netscape like the plague
it is) and I *really* need my home machine to be stable, so I'm running
a straight -stable distribution...

> I don't know of any major commercial software that has gone ELF; NetScape
> is certainly still COFF because there are Linux systems that can't run
> ELF binaries, and it would be silly to cut off your market that way.

Right, but that's at least partially because there haven't been any
major distributions with ELF support (and partially because ELF support
was so shaky)

The Linux "core" is pretty adamant that ELF is the format of the future
and a.out is dead (or at least they were a couple months ago before I
trashed my Linux partitions and switched to FreeBSD :-)

I'd guess that, barring major problems, ELF will be the default format
when Slackware, etc. ship a 1.4.x-based distribution and that Netscape
et al will convert to ELF a year or two after that...

> IMO, increasing percentages will run as more Linux-native apps are also
> distributed native for BSD.

Of course, they aren't really Linux apps then, are they?