Re: ar "zero" flag

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 09:55:54PM +0300, markucz%gmail.com@localhost wrote:
> [..] The actual
> i386 processor is practically desupported in recent versions. Somebody else
> proposed dropping support for building a.out and now you say it's time to
> deprecate static linking.

Just a few side notes: these three changes/proposals are realy different
things if you look at them closer - there is no big cabal moving NetBSD
into MacOS XI behind the scenes:

 - the "real" i386 support did cost us runtime on a very popular arch,
   and apparently was completely (or close to) unused. If anyone with
   such machines in working codition is out there, please speak up - we
   could always revive support for it as a different port, provided someone
   has long term interest in it. I won't hold my breath.

 - the support to build non elf binaries (besides the objcopy to a.out or
   or similar that some archs do for bootblocks and/or kernels) is just a
   minor cleanup, the support could be re-instantiated anytime if needed,
   but it's unlikely to ever be needed again. Besides a few macros, this
   is only about maybe some hundred lines of .mk code. No big deal, and not
   related to still allowing execution of old a.out binaries via COMPAT_*.

 - Desupporting static binaries. This would move our compat abi promise
   from kern<->userland to (basically) libc<->appliation. Think windows.
   This might make some issues easier, but to be effective, we would
   have to use the big time machine, change history and do this effectively
   before NetBSD 0.9 happend, or drop our existing compat promises - IMHO
   this proposal is unlikely to reach quorum.

Sorry, I know this is off topic. I'll shut up now.

Martin