Discussion: Removal of mips half-pic

[Michael Meissner]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 12:51:36AM -0800, Eric Christopher wrote:
> Hi all,
> 	I thought I'd throw this out here since as far as I can tell it isn't
> used anymore, but other comments are welcome. I'm thinking of removing
> the half-pic support from the mips backend. I can't think of a current
> use for it and don't believe it's been used in years. Are there any
> suggestions for a timeline, or can anyone think of a reason to keep it
> around?

The only time it was used was in OSF/1.0 (from OSF, not from DEC), which used
the OSF/rose object format (roughly 1990 time frame).  OSF/1.1 used the
standard ELF tools (and no longer supported the MIPS anyway).  I asked on the
OSF alums mailing list, and could find no extant users of the MIPS half-pic
stuff (which was sort half-baked anyway, and required you to pass -l options at
compile time for the libraries you intended to use).  I think there may have 1
or 2 people with 386/486's with the x86 half-pic stuff, but they weren't
getting new compilers.  I would drop support for the osfrose object file format
at the same time (from mips, x86, and ns32k).  I've been meaning to do it for
years.

-- 
Michael Meissner, Red Hat, Inc.  (GCC group)
PMB 198, 174 Littleton Road #3, Westford, Massachusetts 01886, USA
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