>In this case there is no "try," there is only "do."

The `trying' was about committing cleaner, better versions of the
relevant diffs into the standard NetBSD tree.  Some of the changes
were done ``by hand'', by setting make qualifiers on the command line.

There are no patches agains binutils-2.7 to distribute.  The ar, as,
objcopy, ranlib, nm, size, and strip in the most recent snapshot are
built from unmodified binutils-2.7. No patche are required

The /usr/bin/ld binary in the most recent snapshot is built from an
unreleased gas snapshot intended for alpha testers.  I had built it
and installed it on the system I use for building snapshots.  I hadn't
realized that meant it would automagically appear in the snapshot: I
used to copy binutils binaries out of the running system's /usr/bin.

Though it's not an official release, it works much better on a
mips/elf target than either 2.7, or the patches I consed up for
binutils 2.7 (which are still on ftp.netbsd.org and also available via
http://www.portal.ca/~cjs/.)

>If you're distributing binutils binaries (or any other binaries built
>from GPL'd sources), you _have_ to be willing to distribute sources,
>and should probably be planning well in advance of your distributions
>to do so.

There are no patches to distribute; anyone who wants the binutils
snapshot (gas-970210) can contact me.  Because it's not a released
version of binutils Any bug reports should be sent to me, and not to
the normal binutils bug-reporting channels.

--Jonathan