configure patches for FreeBSD to support >1 architecture

David O'Brien obrien@NUXI.com
Wed May 19 19:36:00 GMT 1999


>   > >   > use them).  BSD prides itself on the quality of it's manpages.
>   > > -static is the preferred option.  -Bstatic is for Stunos compatibility.
>   > 
>   > We agree then that a patch with the snippet above for "-Bstatic" would be
>   > accepted?
> -static is preferred, so what is the point behind changing this spec to use
> -Bstatic?  That seems totally useless to me.  So, no, we are not agreed.

It is not totally useless AND we have no choice.  As I mentioned before
it is the *only* spelling understood by our a.out linker.  The EGCS in
our base tree can generate *both* ELF and a.out binaries.  I am trying to
reduce the diffs between what is our base tree with the official EGCS
release.  (and as I mentioned before "-static" is not documented in
binutils-2.9.1's ``ld'' manpage, where as "-Bstatic" is)

It is my hope that with reworking, the official EGCS compiler could also
be dual platform much as i386/osfrose.h.  The FreeBSD Netscape binary,
XiG Accelerated X server, Metro Link X server are all a.out.  Thus we
still need to be able to compile an a.out X11.  Because our a.out works
so smoothly on our ELF systems, there is little reason for vendors not to
produce a.out and support all versions of FreeBSD.

What is wrong with a FreeBSD-specific change that affect NOBODY other
than FreeBSD?  It is exactly this same stance that made the BSD's
maintain their own toolchains while they were a.out.  One big reason
FreeBSD switched to ELF is because we were tired of maintain our own
toolchain.

-- 
-- David    (obrien@NUXI.com  -or-  obrien@FreeBSD.org)


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