Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 14:44:49 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Kenneth Culver <culverk@alpha.yumyumyum.org> Cc: jstocker@tzi.de, Alexander Kabaev <ak03@gte.com>, Martin Blapp <mb@imp.ch>, imp@village.org, edhall@weirdnoise.com, kris@obsecurity.org, current@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, obrien@FreeBSD.ORG, edhall@screech.weirdnoise.com Subject: Re: gcc -O broken in CURRENT Message-ID: <3C927961.80C43073@mindspring.com> References: <20020315165304.O30658-100000@alpha.yumyumyum.org>
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Kenneth Culver wrote: > At the risk of being yelled at, I have a question: Why do we still need to > support a.out? I know that a lot of people MIGHT still have some a.out > binaries lying around, but FreeBSD's default binary format has been ELF > for 3 or 4 years (Since 3.0-3.1 I believe). I'm not saying that we should > entirely switch over to the regular gnu toolchain, but is it really > necessary to keep supporting a.out? Just my $0.02 The switchover is not trivial. You're asking someone to do work for something that's not really valuable to them. There are certain boot code features that require the use of a.out kernels; this is less an issue than it was, but there were a number of things lost when we went to the new loader that are important for embedded environments. Cross-building for older platforms (not as big an issue, IMO). Other reasons I haven't even thought of yet.... 8-). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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