On Fri, 22 Nov 1996, Chris G Demetriou wrote:

> I don't particularly _like_ all of the aspects of ELF or ELF shared
> libraries, but it's better (in the long term) than going with ECOFF,
> and i don't particularly feel inclined to create my own executable
> format...  8-)
> 
> A.out has historically had no 'well-defined' shared library scheme.
> Paul Kranenburg took the closest thing to that, the Sun method, and
> implemented something pretty close to that...

Well, I still don't have any documentation on ECOFF, so I'm way
out on a limb here, but if it's not too much different from COFF,
it's essentially a slightly extended a.out, in which case we could
adapt our current a.out shared library scheme to it fairly `easily.'

This would also give us some other advantages, such as being able
to tell the difference between Linux/Alpha and NetBSD/Alpha
executables before they've made some system calls.

However, if ELF shared libs are there or almost there, one probably
does not want to go backward.

However, I still don't see where weak symbols come in. According
to the Linux/i386 ELF documentation I've read, symbol overriding
works just as it would when linking statically, and weak symbols
aren't necessary.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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