From owner-freebsd-current  Fri Mar 15 15:21:48 2002
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Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 18:21:14 -0500 (EST)
From: Kenneth Culver <culverk@alpha.yumyumyum.org>
To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
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
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> > 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-).
>
Yeah, I was just wondering if there were issues making us keep a.out stuff
in FreeBSD aside from the "I wanna run 2.2.x programs" issue.

Ken


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