In article <20020915085241.F2597@dr-evil.shagadelic.org>
thorpej@wasabisystems.com writes:

>  > I'm currently using a.out on i386, and have found some off-by-one
>  > errors which does not occur on ELF toolchain.
> 
> Hm.  What specific errors have you found?

Please take a look at
	pkgsrc/audio/cdparanoia/patches/patch-ae (search for "dispcache")
	pkgsrc/sysutils/xbatt/patches/patch-ab   (first hunk)

I found and fixed them since I tested them on a.out toolchain.

If a program is only tested on ELF toolchain, the quality of code
is like this.

ELF has other too unique features (ex. C symbols and assembler symbols
are same, dynamic linker automatically loads dependent libraries),
which make it easy to write non-portable programs.

> BTW, you can get ELF to arrange data more-or-less like a.out, as well.  All
> you need to do is write a linker script for it.

I don't think that the layout of initialized data can be re-arranged
in linker stage.

> (2) is no problem; they are in the 1.6 source tree, and will always be
> available in the CVS Attic.  However, the revisions will be marked dead
> on the HEAD, in order to shrink the size of the checked-out repository.

~300KB is not acceptable in the HEAD?

287     src/gnu/usr.bin/ld

Mmm, gas / gas.new may not be acceptable....

gas:
2682    src/gnu/usr.bin/gas

gas.new:
6495    src/gnu/dist/bfd
4735    src/gnu/dist/gas
1212    src/gnu/dist/include
1795    src/gnu/dist/opcodes
2185    src/gnu/lib/libbfd
167     src/gnu/usr.bin/gas.new
16589   total
-- 
ITOH Yasufumi