Folks,

I want to move NetBSD/sparc to ELF real soon.  Unless something
dramatic happens, I'll do this next weekend.

I'll provide a full ELF snapshot on ftp.netbsd.org to ease the
transition for -current followers. If you want to build everything
yourself: see the instructions that Christos posted to this forum.

Binary compatibility of dynamically linked a.out executables is
going to require some care. The shared libraries they use and
the run-time linker must remain available. They are going to be
relocated in `/emul/aout'.  I plan to make a `compat' package
available which will contain the 1.4 native shared libraries as
well as the X11R6 shared libraries.  As far as shared libs in
`/usr/pkg/lib' go, I'm not sure what can be done besides
providing a word of caution and saying "good luck"...  Any input
on this matter would be appreciated.

At approximately the same time I'll make some changes in the sparc's
ansi.h header to make it easier to share compiler tools with sparc64.
Unfortunately, this means that the compiler must be rebuilt because
of it's built-in notion of `size_t' (for the mem*() functions).
Note that this change is totally unrelated to the `ELF move'; it is
only done about simultaneously in this way to make these two
relatively pervasive changes appear to cause annoyance only once..

-pk