On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 11:59:22AM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote: > Alan, > > > > So, can we have COFF/a.out support back, at least for sparc*? > > > > I would rather remove all AOUT support. AOUT as a format has been > > obsolete since the advent of ELF in the 1990s. See for example > > J. Arnold "ELF: An Object File to Mitigate Mischievous Misoneism", In > > Proc. of the Summer USENIX Conference, 1990. > > COFF should have died too.. > > > > The sparc target obsolescence happened here: > > https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2016-09/msg00184.html > > > > You've had quite a bit of warning, but I guess you just built binutils > > with --enable-obsolete, or stayed with older binutils. Well, older > > binutils are likely to be better for AOUT anyway. So what's to > > prevent you using older binutils for sparc-aout? > > I don't like things being put that way and I find it against the spirit > of free software and its mission to deliver superior solutions that do not > put unnecessary limits upon users. If people have a need for a feature, > then I think it is the wrong thing to refuse it from the position of > authority given that code for that exists.
I'm grumpy, but the advice about using older binutils for unmaintained ports is good. I'm also not against reinstating sparc-aout if someone maintains it, but doubt there is anyone wanting to do the work. "git log bfd/aoutx.h" if you want an illustration of points I make in my other reply on this thread. > However, as usually, we, as a group of people working on binutils, are a > limited resource and cannot afford taking care of less commonly used > features we have no use for ourselves. So I think a fair way of putting > things would be to offer the resurrection of the feature provided that > someone steps in and offers to maintain it properly, so that other people, > and general maintainers in particular, do not have to worry about it. > > I suspect that, just like with MIPS ECOFF support, it will be enough if > we have BFD support, so that tools like `objcopy' and `objdump' continue > working, and all the hairy linker infrastructure can go. But that would > have to be confirmed by actual users. Same about GDB if required; I > believe the same basic BFD support will suffice to support the GDB side. > > FWIW, > > Maciej -- Alan Modra Australia Development Lab, IBM _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
