In article <200008070309.e7739WZ02399@flash.vaultron.com>,
Andrew Gillham <gillham@vaultron.com> wrote:
> Paul Goyette writes:
> > For those of us who have lost track of whether this affects us or not,
> > is there some easy way to find out if we still have anything hanging
> > around that might use COMPAT_AOUT?
> 
> The only way this could possibly affect you is if you were using the
> fact that aout binaries only (first?) look in /emul/aout for any files.
> I can't really think of a good example of this type of (ab)use.  There are
> probably a couple of obvious ones like seperate configuration files for an
> aout binary, but I can't think of any right now. :-)
> 
> Basically the whole point of COMPAT_AOUT is/was to allow aout binaries to
> _find their libraries_, not provide a "shadow filesystem" for them.  The
> proposed change won't affect the ability to run shared aout binaries on
> an ELF system.

This has been discussed too many times before... One scenario that you
need to find things in the shadow tree is the compiler toolchain. I.e.
the a.out compiler will continue to work in the ELF environment with
COMPAT_AOUT. 

In anycase, I did not write COMPAT_AOUT for general use. I wrote it to
help me transition the i386 and sparc to ELF. Maybe other ports will
find it useful when they transition, maybe not. I don't use it anymore
and I have suffered enough from the confusion of cd /usr oops. where am I?

In other words I don't care if it stays or goes, but it should not be
turned on by default. Specially now when we have the doctored ld.so.

christos