Well, speaking from a luser's point of view (I make no claim as to my
understanding of the nuts and bolts of ld/gas), if the "few further hacks"
take less effort than what is required to unravel the existing mess, I'll
cast my vote in that direction. Development on my own arm project here has
been stalled because I can't update my CATS box to -current, and I would
really like to port to a new arm-based board we have in the works here.

I don't have any qualms about just unravelling the existing mess and
breaking old shared libs either though, so if that takes less effort than
keeping the the existing code updated until ELF, I'm willing to use that
too. At this point, the pain of rebuilding all my shared libs is far
outweighed by my inability to keep pace with the source tree IMHO. However,
I'll admit that my arm box is not my primary work system, so I have less
fear of blowing it away/breaking it. For those arm users out there who use
the port for day-to-day work, this is probably not true, and we should take
that into account too.

-Edwin

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Earnshaw [mailto:rearnsha@arm.com]
Sent: Friday, December 04, 1998 12:12 PM
To: cgd@netbsd.org
Cc: Charles M. Hannum; port-arm32@netbsd.org; kristerw@netbsd.org;
pk@netbsd.org; mark@causality.com; richard.earnshaw@arm.com
Subject: Re: PIC hacks 

Yeah, Yeah, all valid points, but my point is: is it really worth 
expending a lot of effort unravelling the existing mess (especially if it 
creates an incompatibility) if a few further hacks would keep the old 
world running until a new one (elf based) can replace it in its entirity?

I'm not in a position to make the decision for anyone, just trying to 
cover the options.

Richard.

----
Edwin Foo
Compaq Cambridge Research Laboratory
efoo@crl.dec.com