Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com> wrote:
>On Thu, 27 Aug 1998, Matt Thomas wrote:
>
>: But I think I have successfully done that.  So once binutils gets updated
>: to 2.9.1 I'll merge in my changes and we can ignore the old toolchain
>: for VAX.  
>
>This will happen soonish, I'd think ... it's needed for PowerPC as well.

Call me stupid, but so far nobody has been able to explain to *why* ELF
is such a Good Thing. All I know about it is that it doesn't even have
an operating system identification in executables (needed for proper
emulation modes or at least recognition for which OS a binary is) so
that various OSes have kludged around this in incompatible ways. The
fact that the Linux clan hasn't managed to do proper shared libs with
a.out does of course not count; from NetBSD we can see that it is
perfectly possible. Or would ELF (as in a fairy tale ;-) magically make
shared libs much more efficient even on NetBSD platforms where they
already exist?

>-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)
-Olaf.
--
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