Re: [Proposed binutils PATCH] Re: Diagnosing an intricate C++ problem

["H . J . Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Sun, Sep 03, 2000 at 09:10:28PM +0200, Marc Espie wrote:
> In article <20000903111111.A8315@lucon.org> you write:
> >On Sun, Sep 03, 2000 at 05:31:09PM +0100, Philip Blundell wrote:
> >> >>FWIW, as far as I know, binutils 2.10 is too old and so many bugs
> >> >>have been fixed since then.
> 
> >> >Here's hoping that binutils next release won't have to wait for another
> >> >three years...
> 
> >> My plan is to make 2.10.1 in a few weeks, and 2.11 at the end of the year.
> 
> >> If H.J can be more specific about which bugs he is having trouble
> >with, we can 
> >> consider including the fixes in 2.10.1.
> 
> 
> >All ELF and Linux related bug fixes are important to Linux. On the
> >other hand, it takes me much less time to fix the current CVS than
> >backport all those patches to 2.10.  Please don't do it for Linux. We
> >have to use the one based on the current sourceware.
> 
> Please do it for other platforms. Not every system has an over-eager
> H.J.Lu churning bug-fixed after bug-fixed release of binutils...

I have a long standing problem with xxxBSD. When we first moved to ELF
from a.out several years ago, I invited xxxBSD people to join Linux to
work on the ELF support in binutils with us. I was told that xxxBSD
didn't need ELF. As the result, the Linux people is the only one who
really used/tested the ELF support in binutils. Thanks to Ian and many
other Linux developers, we have a quite good ELF support in binutils.
You can tell from those ChangeLogs that Most of the new ELF stuff come
from Linux. At this point, I really don't care if binutils works on
xxxBSD or not. On the other hand, if they follow the ELF spec, they
should be ok as Linux. In the worst case, they can just run the Linux
binaries directly :-).

If all those platforms on which binutils is the native tool follow the
CVS repository on sourceware and make sure it works for them in CVS,
the binutils release manager will have a much easier time to make a new
release. I have been doing it for Linux for years. It is quite doable
if you want to.


H.J.