"Michael D. Harnois" wrote: > On Thu, 2002-02-21 at 04:03, David O'Brien wrote: > > On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 12:05:31AM +0100, Stijn Hoop wrote: > > > > > > Maybe this can now be committed? > > > > NOT until I have sufficient feedback from the FSF Binutils developers. > > OK, I'm confused. binutils has been broken for three weeks. We have a > patch that we know fixes, at the very least, one of the known problems. > However, it can't be committed without feedback from the developers. > > So having binutils broken indefinitely is better than applying a patch > that *might* have to be backed out or altered later?
I believe the intent is to ensure that the patches make it back into the FSF distributed code, so that in the future, there is less maintenance required for FreeBSD platforms. This offloading of maintenance is a good idea, considering the stated positions of those with the currently thankless job of beating FSF code into submission to make it run on FreeBSD platforms. Actually, there was a discussion at BSDCon as to whether or not to drop the a.out support in order to decrease the patch size necessary to make the FSF distributed code do what FreeBSD needed it to do (personally, I would prefer that the a.out code generation be integrated back into the FSF code base but this is unlikely for FSF political reasons with regard to the intent to get rid of the a.out standard entirely). Such changes to the FreeBSD toolchain are necessary, unless there is sufficient support for what the FSF views as being gratuitous differences (e.g. not replacing BSD make with GNU make like FreeBSD is "supposed to do", etc.). While I would incredibly dislike losing a.out, since most of the promised advantages of ELF have not materialized (some, such as linking a library against a library have... but only for shared libraries), I have to side with David O'Brien, since he is at least actively involved in maintaining the code in question. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
