From owner-freebsd-hackers  Tue Feb 13 16:17:04 1996
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To: Nate Williams <nate@sri.MT.net>
Subject: Re: Q: Somebody working on more recent binutils ? 
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 13 Feb 1996 16:28:00 MST
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 17:16:51 -0700
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
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: The version of ld in FreeBSD is a *very* old version (1.X).  It has been
: *heavily* hacked to support shared libraries.  The current binutils is
: at version 2, which is *radically* different from version 1, so it's not
: a simple matter of 'updating' the bits.

It makes it much harder to build a cross compiler for FreeBSD,
especially on an Alpha.  However, you can build a cross compiler on,
say, Linux with only a moderate amount of hacking.

I took a peek at doing it and also came to the "icky-foo-foo"
conclusion.  It was easier to port the ld in FreeBSD to the target env
than to port the deltas to 2.6 :-(.

It sure would be nice, but fear it is a *BIG* task...

Warner