IA32 bootstrap error

[Richard Kenner]

    I can see that they're somewhat co-dependent as they're each the
    primary consumer/producer of this sort of stuff, but that's not the
    promise that ELF and Dwarf were trying to make.  The goal was to be
    interoperable across the object file level, wasn't it?

I strongly agree.

    Additionally, the "it's all one product" approach leads to creep
    between the modules.  Today, I had to find and fix two GCC-isms and
    one GLIBC-ism that have crept into GDB.  So testing everything as one
    big unit, in addition to raising the price tag of intellecual
    manageability for working on these things, has problems of its own.

Yes, the whole point of keeping software complexity managable is to
keep modules as a small as possible and have as few dependencies as
possible between them.

    So while it's understandable that for specific cases they have to be
    lockstepped, let's please be careful to not go too far down this path.
    "Oh, and you need cvs GLIBC.  And cvs linux kernel..."

Likewise, I strongly agree here.

This has been a disturbing trend of late, to require the absolute latest
of everything.