Re: aout-* packages
> Are these new aout-* packages going to stay the same name forever?
Probably as long as we support a.out.
> And also,
> are there going to be elf-* packages under the debian-1.0 tree too?
The elf-* packages were experimental packages, for those maintainers that
wanted too look ahead towards ELF; they kind of treated ELF as a cross-compile
platform, using /usr/i486-linuxelf.
They are now rapidly being obseleted.
Since 1.0 is going to be ELF (meaning that all its binaries will be ELF, and
that it compiles for ELF by default), with backward compatibility to compile
and run a.out binaries, new packages are being made, that put their ELF stuff
in the standard locations, and treat a.out as a cross-compile platform.
E.g.
elf-gcc-2.7.0 used /usr/i486-linuxelf; it is superseded by the new
gcc-2.7.0, which uses /usr/{bin,lib,...}. This conflicts with the
old gcc, which also used these directories, and which is therefore replaced by
aout-gcc, which uses /usr/i486-linuxaout.
Currently, the following parts of this transition are done or nearly done:
gcc, binutils, libc, libgdbm, libreadline.
As far as I can see, the following packages will have to go through this
transition: electric-fence, libdb (part of libc4, but not of libc5; I'll take
a look at this), libg++, libident, libncurses.
David, can you comment on this list?
Hope this helps,
Ray
--
Obsig: developing a new sig
Reply to: