[ Majordomo won't reply to me, so I hope I'm subscribed to the list now and that my message will go through -- I'll try resending if it doesn't. ] Hi, thought I'd chime in with my own perspective since I was CCed. First up, I just want to clarify that we're not saying you have to change anything. As the person who's been doing most of the work on this (adding support for NetBSD to our package manager / collection, which I'm doing because I like NetBSD), it's important to me that the work I've been doing is about changing Nixpkgs to work better for NetBSD, not changing NetBSD to work better for Nixpkgs. I'm happy enough with what we have now, which is a special case that says "if the user asks for a NetBSD build, and it's for an architecture where binutils would default to a.out, override it to force it to ELF". The only reason we do that in the first place is that binutils doesn't support NetBSD a.out any more. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason to bring this up at all is to check with you folks is to check whether there's an improvement to be made to binutils here that we could volunteer our time to help with. If there's not, and you're happy with the current situation, that's okay and we won't bother you any further. :) With that in mind, I'd like to explain what I think the room for improvement here is from the perspective of a binutils user, rather than a Nixpkgs developer: I recently wanted to cross-compile a program to an i686 NetBSD system. I tried building an upstream GNU cross toolchain with --host=i686-unknown-netbsd, and I got an error saying that the platform was unsupported. That surprised me, so I asked a NetBSD developer I know for help, and was told that i*86-unknown-netbsd means a.out to the GNU build system by default, and that the scary message from binutils just meant it didn't support NetBSD a.out, and if I changed it to "netbsdelf" it would be fine. So, the question this has raised for us is, is it maybe time to get GNU to update this default, so cross-compiling for i686-unknown-netbsd would have got me what I intended? As I understand it, (please correct me if I'm wrong), ELF has been the predominant executable format on NetBSD for a long time now, and the GNU source code implies they meant for the default to be changed at some point. That's really it -- is it worth trying to get that updated in GNU? Would there be any drawbacks to it? It just seems to me like changing the default here would make sense for everybody, so I wanted to ask to find out if that's true. Alyssa Ross
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