From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 24 8:17: 8 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from comton.airs.com (comton.airs.com [199.103.241.106]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2989414BD8 for ; Wed, 24 Mar 1999 08:17:05 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from ian@airs.com) Received: (qmail 6913 invoked by uid 269); 24 Mar 1999 16:16:43 -0000 Message-ID: <19990324161643.6912.qmail@comton.airs.com> Date: 24 Mar 1999 11:16:43 -0500 From: Ian Lance Taylor To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD FAQ and a.out Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In the FreeBSD FAQ at http://www.FreeBSD.org/FAQ/FAQ225.html#227 you say ``Even though the a.out executable format has served us well, the GNU people, who author the compiler tools we use, have dropped support for the a.out format.'' As one of the GNU people--I'm the GNU binutils maintainer--I don't think this is quite right, and it recently led to confusion on gnu.misc.discuss. We never dropped support for a.out--it is supported just as well as it ever was, and that includes complete support for SunOS style shared libraries. We did encourage people to move to ELF, because it is better. It supports multiple sections, permits the alignment of those sections to be set individually, and it provides shared library support that is as good as SunOS and is easier to understand. Multiple sections permits neat hacks like bash extracting the set of long options from the executable, in order to option completion, in a reasonably portable fashion. From my perspective as the GNU binutils maintainer, the BSD folks developed a lot of a.out support code which was never contributed back to the GNU binutils. I would always have been happy to accept those patches, but as far as I can recall, nobody ever seriously tried to contribute them. So we didn't drop support for a.out; in the sense in which you mean, we never had it. I would appreciate if you could clarify this in the FAQ to avoid future confusion. Thanks. Ian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message