On Sun, Oct 25, 1998 at 11:53:28AM -0500, Todd Vierling wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> 
> : Not quite.  We could also fix the problem by bumping the major version of 
> : shared libs that changed their interface.  Old programs (built with the 
> : old compiler) would then continue to use the old libs (built with the old 
> : compiler).  New programs and libs could then be set up to do things 
> : differently.
> 
> Um, we can't do that with, say, any library in the NetBSD source tree,
> particularly libc and libm.  And what about third-party code?
> 
> : Don't forget the ABI was also changed between 1.2 and 1.3 when we went 
> : from hard to soft floating point.  The only reason we got away with it 
> : then was that 1.2 didn't have shared libs.
> 
> Well, now we do.  Shared libraries bring in their own very large can of
> worms.


Speaking of which, is anyone working on eliminating the crawling horror
which is the present arm32 "PIC" shared library mechanism?  That'll be
a flag day, too, won't it?  Requiring a change in magic number or emulation
number.

Perhaps we should make a little list of changes that will require such a
flag day, and try to do them all at once.