Re: fat binaries

[Gregory McGarry <g.mcgarry%ieee.org@localhost>]

Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:

> Depends on what you want to achieve. If your goal is to distribute
> "binary" software to customers, it is one of the best options. On the
> other hand, you have almost Java if you follow too much into that
> direction.

Good point.  So here are some goals:

(1) user can run a default install (share userland) on different  
machines/different kernels
(2) third-party developer can release a binary which supports  
(popular/many/most) netbsd architectures
(3) user can copy binary to another netbsd machine and "just work"

So the discussion so far has addressed the goals as:

(1) fat, magic symlinks, cdf, isaexec, bytecode
(2) fat, bytecode
(3) fat, bytecode

cdf and isaexec seem to be tools for the system administrator.   
Clearly goals (2) and (3) are not satisfied, and the unsuspecting  
user would be surprised that the binary doesn't work on another machine.

For a bytecode project, NetBSD userland would need to be compiled.  I  
don't believe that netbsd could be compiled to java bytecode.  I  
haven't looked into LLVM, TenDRA, inferno, etc to see if the rhetoric  
is true.