Date: 11 Feb 1999 09:25:56 +0200 From: Heikki Suonsivu <hsu@clinet.fi> To: Bill Fumerola <billf@chc-chimes.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 3.0-19990202-SNAP a.out problem Message-ID: <x2ogn1csfv.fsf@katiska.clinet.fi> In-Reply-To: Bill Fumerola's message of 3 Feb 1999 22:55:14 %2B0200 References: <Pine.HPP.3.96.990203093156.27586F-100000@hp9000.chc-chimes.com.newsgate.clinet.fi>
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Bill Fumerola <billf@chc-chimes.com> writes: > On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Mike Holling wrote: > > I suspect that this decision will be reversed, or a huge majority of the > > -stable crowd will stick with 2.2.8 forever. It's pretty unlikely that > > everything can be recompiled for ELF that quickly. > That quickly? There has been considerable (6 month?) warning. > - bill fumerola - billf@chc-chimes.com - BF1560 - computer horizons corp - > - ph:(800) 252-2421 - bfumerol@computerhorizons.com - billf@FreeBSD.org - As far as I understood there will always be compatibility, so I do not really mind, if it not too complicated to handle. The advantage in going to ELF like everyone else seems to do allows using up-to-date binaries tools, so that is a big improvement. Sidenote; we have been running FreeBSD for quite a while, so I quickly did some counting on our /usr/local/bin to see how much I would appreciate keeping backwards compatibility around. We have total of 1150 links in /usr/local/bin. Some of those are symlinks, but I do not think that makes that much difference. Out of that we have the following distribution by year: Year Files % 1998 275 23.91 (includes 1999) 1997 363 31.56 1996 191 16.60 1995 255 22.17 1994 61 5.30 1993 5 0.43 ---------------------- total 1150 100.00 1993 binaries are known by file to be NetBSD binaries. I think we started by using early NetBSD and switched over to 1.1.x somewhere around 1993-1994. >From the oldest binaries I think some are such that there is no more sources available, it does not compile any more or new version now requires something we do not have like motif. I guess we can cope without things like "mosaic.2.0", so that probably would not be that much an issue. These binaries originate from several different hundred packages, so digging up all necessary source code the recompile them would be a quite an effort, as some older packages usually have tendency no to compile any more. Ports does not help too much as many ports seem to change defaults, which forces us to manually compile everything anyway and use ports as reference only. -- Heikki Suonsivu / Clinet Oy / Tekniikantie 12 / FI-02150 Espoo / FINLAND, hsu@clinet.fi mobile +358-40-5519679 work +358-9-43542270 fax -4555276 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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