Hi,

do we still have any operating system that is supposed to support the 
a.out shared library format together with pkgsrc? Currently 
_OPSYS_SHLIB_TYPE is defined to ELF/a.out on the *BSD platforms, but do 
we really have some support for a.out left?

The reason I'm asking is that on these platforms, the 
mk/plist/shlib-type program gets called, which invokes the C compiler. 
That means that even packages that say USE_LANGUAGES=#none need a 
working C compiler. I'd like to get rid of that dependency.

By the way, could anyone who is familiar with the history of the a.out 
format please add some information about it to Wikipedia? ;) I'm 
especially interested in some information about _when_ it has been 
deprecated and replaced mostly by ELF.

Roland