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Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 09:30:41 -0700 (PDT)
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From: Mark Diekhans <markd@Grizzly.COM>
To: narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee
CC: dennis@etinc.com, hackers%freebsd.org@sunrise.cs.berkeley.edu,
        jkh%time.cdrom.com@sunrise.cs.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960809182840.13368F@haldjas.folklore.ee> (message
	from Narvi on Fri, 9 Aug 1996 18:33:24 +0300 (EET DST))
Subject: Re: What are the plans for ELF support?
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>On Fri, 9 Aug 1996, Dennis wrote:
>
>> And also to justify the extra work (and nightmares) of multiple object
>> support during the transition period....
>
>And if FreeBSD is going to continue the tradition of backwards 
>compatibility, someone will have to dream up a new way of doing the 
>compat dists - compat1x, 2x, 21, etc.

The work in doing the runtime bind of the a.out shared libraries is done by
/usr/libexec/ld.so. Old programs linked with old libraries should work as long
as ld.so continues to support a.out shared libraries.  Of course, if one
actually wants to rebuild these libraries, the old ld has to remain around.

The hard compatibility issues seems to be linking new programs with existing
a.out libraries that have not been converted.  Probably wanting to mix a.out 
with newer elf libraries (e.g. existing motif libraries one paid real money
for) with the current system libraries.