Re: Patch not included in e2fsprogs 1.21.

[Philip Blundell]

>I understand this is policy -- specifically policy.text.gz, 4.2.  This policy
>makes perfect sense for a.out shared libraries (where were all the rage when
>this policy was written).  Does this policy still make sense?

Actually, this is a bit backwards.  Linux a.out shared libraries never 
supported PIC, and this was the major reason for abandoning them and moving to 
ELF.  The lack of position independence meant that in order to make a library 
shareable, it always had to live at a fixed address, which in turn 
necessitated a central registry of shared libraries and their addresses, plus 
a fairly convoluted procedure for actually building the things.

Other operating systems, like NetBSD, used PIC code with a.out libraries quite 
successfully.  Because of that they had much less pressure to switch to ELF.

p.

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