On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 11:07:58AM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > On the other hand, why does bfd even need to be reworked so much?
You'd think that the AOUT and COFF support would be stable by now, and that's true enough. There are two or three problems that waste maintainers time though. One is that people write fuzzers and take a delight in submitting bug reports for this old code. Those bugs take up time Nick and I would rather spend elsewhere. I suppose we could just close them as "won't fix", but they are undeniably bugs, and a bug that crashes a program might just be exploitable when some luser runs objdump as root. Another is that people report bugs about leaked memory. Generally that's also a "don't care", since none of "ld", "as" or any of the binutils run as servers. Finally, when anyone wants to make changes to data structures or functions used by all the backends, we have to change all this old code too. It's not a matter of reworking the code. No one wants to work on it at all! At least, judging by the number of people actively maintaining most of binutils, that seems to be the case. Are *you* interested in maintaining sparc-aout or sparc-coff? There are sparc bug reports dating back to 2004 that no one has analyzed! -- Alan Modra Australia Development Lab, IBM _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
