On Nov 11,  3:16pm, wrstuden@nas.nasa.gov (Bill Studenmund) wrote:
-- Subject: re: compat/aout [was: Re: Upcoming releases]

Per Bill's request, I am posting this to tech-userlevel to solicit opinions:

[the background here is we are trying to decide what to do about having
 a.out compatibility in 1.5:
	- use the existing compat_aout which has the shadow tree resolution
	  problem
	- hack the ld.so to look in different places which has the migration
	  to /path/to/lib/aout problem
]

| On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Christos Zoulas wrote:
| 
| > 
| > It seemed like too much work to fix ld.so, and it was not very clear
| > how to do it. For example, what do you do with paths outside /usr/lib
| > like -R/usr/pkg/lib?  I also wanted to keep a.out stuff outside /usr/lib
| > and not pollute the new elf stuff with old a.out files so it would be
| > easier to cleanup. Plus it seemed ugly to me to have to versions of ld.so.
| > What do you do? You compile it one way for the people that have converted
| > to elf, and another way for the people that still run a.out?
| > 
| > I have no problems nuking compat_aout for the problems people mentioned
| > before. I wrote compat_aout because I needed to run a.out binaries while
| > I was debugging elf stuff, and I wanted to have an easy way to switch
| > back and forth between elf and a.out. I did not care about running a.out
| > binaries perfectly :-) It gave me an incentive to recompile everything
| > with elf...
| 
| And while I'd love to toss it, I am glad you wrote the /emul/aout stuff -
| it got us far enough along in ELF that we can see better what we want to
| do.
| 
| Should we move this thread to tech-userland?
| 
| While I have ideas on what to do, I've never hacked on ld.so and I don't
| think we want to thrash everyone as I climb the learning curve. :-)
| 
| Take care,
| 
| Bill
-- End of excerpt from Bill Studenmund