Re: Committed: fix cris-aout testsuite, disable --pic. RFC: remove emulations?

[Hans-Peter Nilsson <hans-peter dot nilsson at axis dot com>]

> Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 21:30:54 +0930
> From: Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>

> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 05:31:18AM +0200, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote:
> > On a related note, are there any known serious users of the gas
> > "emulations" support (gas support generating multiple object
> > formats, with one selected on the command-line)?  It seems the
> > CRIS port is the only default user, with other usage requiring
> > --enable-targets=all and only supporting i386-* and x86_64-*
> > targets.  Is it desirable to remove this support?  ISTR a shared
> > sentiment among those lines...  It easily breaks like in
> > <http://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2010-10/msg00391.html>.
> 
> Given that the emulation support doesn't work that well, I'd say no
> one will use it beyond initial experimentation.  I did poke at the
> code many years ago, but gave up on the idea of fixing it.

No specific fixing needed: FWIW, it "works for me", at least for
ELF and a.out, though I'm not sure (nor do I care) how good the
a.out quality is.  Anyway, I don't want to be the only user of
brittle machinery that I don't actually need.

>  There are
> just too many COFF and AOUT target macros.

Yes, a there has to be lots of e.g. "OUTPUT_FLAVOR ==
bfd_target_elf_flavour" in the target macros.

So, can I take that as an indication that you officially support
removing it?

brgds, H-P