In article <20020914094043.S2597@dr-evil.shagadelic.org>
thorpej@wasabisystems.com writes:

> I am planning on removing the old toolchain (i.e. the stuff that gets
> built when USE_NEW_TOOLCHAIN is not set) from the tree.  This should
> shrink the side of the source tree considerably (no more "2 copies
> of GCC, 2 copies of binutils", etc.)

The a.out world is still working.  Will you please keep it?

I think keeping a.out would contribute to quality of our code base.
For example, the traditional a.out toolchain places static data
more densely than the ELF toolchain.
I'm currently using a.out on i386, and have found some off-by-one
errors which does not occur on ELF toolchain.

So, will you please
 1. port the a.out handling to the new toolchain, or
 2. keep (at least) the old gas / ld for now?

I prefer 1., of course. :)

Currently, the new toolchain doesn't handle a.out correctly.
 - missing PIC/shared object support on ld,
 - .weak support is broken (C++ programs dump core).

I tried to make the new toolchain work for a.out
and I succeeded (probably) to make gas working for PIC,
but I failed to fix the above problems....
-- 
ITOH Yasufumi