> I've volunteered to upgrade two alphas running 1.2 to something newer.
> First, some questios:
> 
> 	1)  Does -current support shared libraries?

Not quite yet.  There are some unresolved issues which have to be
dealt with before it will.  In particular:

(1) a 'good' way of actually determining whether or not an ELF binary
is for NetBSD/Alpha needs to be come up with and implemented.  I've
asked 'core' what to do about that several times, and haven't gotten a
real answer that i could actually go and implement, and which solves
the identification problems.

(2) for at least a few functions in libc, weak references are
_needed_, else things break.  J.T. said (last night) that he'd have
the ivory_soap2 libc branch (weak references + libc namespace cleanup)
pulled down by wednesday.  That should solve this problem.  If not,
i've got the interim solution i'm currently using.

(3) shared linker needs to be integrated into the source tree.

(4) there are a few outstanding toolchain issues (bugs) all of which
can be worked around, but for which i'd rather see fixes.


> 	2)  Is the current tree considered "stable"?

Well, I'm using it (both static ECOFF and dynamically-linked ELF) on
two of my machines here, and it's stable as far as I can tell.

What that says?  I dunno.  8-)


> 	3)  Are there other tools I will need?

Until ELF + dynamic linking support is actually wrapped up, you should
continue using the toolchain and toolchain sources that I've provided.
Some of them may not compile with -current due to minor changes i've
made in the headers, but those can be hacked around.  It's not clear
that you'd want to update your tools -- they've not changed in a long
time.


Once ELF + dynamic linking support is ready for public consumption,
i'm going to be publishing diffs to gcc 2.7.2.1, binutils 2.7, and gdb
4.16, as well as build processes that (hopefully) will take you from
1.2 and -current (i.e. what's publically available at that time) to
the new style of executables.



chris