>Aha, so its the ELF vs a.out thing that determins it.

Well, it isn't inherent in the object file format.  It is because the way
the ld.so works on our a.out and ELF platform.

AFAIK, there's nothing that prevents us form changing the a.out ld.so so
that it doesn't use ldconfig/ld.so.cache anymore.

-- 
Christoph Badura
Verlag O'Reilly