On Aug 7, 2008, at 4:02 PM, Martin Husemann wrote:
- 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_*.
Please note that, AFAIK, our current toolchain does not actually support building the NetBSD a.out shared library format.
- Desupporting static binaries. This would move our compat abi promisefrom kern<->userland to (basically) libc<->appliation. Think windows.This might make some issues easier, but to be effective, we wouldhave to use the big time machine, change history and do this effectively before NetBSD 0.9 happend, or drop our existing compat promises - IMHOthis proposal is unlikely to reach quorum.
Windows is not the only platform that does this. OS X is like this, as is Solaris, IIRC. We don't need a big time machine to go back and fix 0.9 ... We simply need to make the decision, and from that point forward, no more need for new compat code in the kernel. When we bump the libc major is a good time for this, I think.
-- thorpej