| Also, what about upgrading packages??
   
   This is a complete lose. This is why the compat_aout is better in this case,

it's not better.

   because you can move all your packages in /emul/aout, and start from scratch.
   With compat_aout you can also have a version of the toolchain that produces
   a.out binaries coexisting with your elf one.

via a kernel hack.  i'd rather have a cross compiler.  or a chroot
environment.
   
   The major problem with packages is that you cannot live in a mixed world;
   if you upgrade parts to elf you will need to upgrade all dependent packages
   and it is a big cascading effect. Moving the libs to pkg/lib/aout can help,
   but there might be other .so files in other places [the XFree86 server
   .so files are an example]. Does perl have .so files in funny places too?


you're right here though.  basically, if you use pkgsrc, changing to ELF
basically means rebuilding it all from scratch.  anything else is just
destined to lose and we should be telling people that this is what they
should do to avoid any problems.  we should also well document the modified
a.out shared loader so that people can make things work if they want.

and perl has .so files all over the place AFAIK.