On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

: I was running both a.out and ELF lib for a while, just as described
: (with 1.5-aout ld.so, plus saved ldconfig and ldd-aout in /usr/local.)
: 
: You do not _need_ COMPAT_AOUT path munging...

Unless you want to do a piecemeal pkg upgrade __without__ bringing the
system into a partly-usable state to do the upgrades, which was the original
request.  This small detail is quite important.

If you try to do this in-place, you'll have applications "missing", with
longer missing times for applications that have many dependencies (since you
have to upgrade all dependencies before an application can be replaced).

: > 1.5 will be shipping with a replacement /usr/libexec/ld.so that will search
: > /emul/aout automatically for a.out binaries (obsoleting one purpose of the
: > COMPAT_AOUT option).  However, it doesn't help any software that needs to
: > reference /usr/pkg/etc, /usr/pkg/libexec, or other binaries in /usr/pkg/bin,
: > since those directories need to be "out of the way" as you do the piecemeal
: > upgrade.
: 
: Actually it does reference /usr/pkg/{etc,libexec} as well as ever, as
: long as you _don't_ _move_ anything.

Which doesn't help when you have a binary in /usr/pkg/bin that needs config
files in /usr/pkg/etc and you want to upgrade dependency pkgs without
borking that application in the meantime.

I actually don't use COMPAT_AOUT on most of my machines any longer; it
performed the piecemeal upgrade beautifully on those systems, and I had
*zero* downtime, barring the reboot into the modified kernel, during the
upgrades.  "Don't knock it until you try it."

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  http://www.wasabisystems.com/
-- Speed, stability, security, and support.  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.