On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, Richard Earnshaw wrote:

: 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 believe the problems were only with shlibs, and that _programs_ are not
affected.  Could Charles chime in to verify, please?

ELF is far more incompatible, especially for near term.  That means a new
COMPAT_* module, and losing on future updates to libc for already installed
a.out format binaries.

If we were to fix a.out to be "correct", we could conceivably get away with
a special third party version of ld.so that understands "correct" and "old"
shared libraries that could be installed as a "compat" type of pkg.  Users
using only, say, 1.4+ binaries could use the ld.so from the NetBSD src
trunk.  We'd just have to "stamp" the new format shlibs so that the type
would be identifiable.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)