Re: elf, a.out and debian 1.*
Dale Scheetz:
Let's be clear here Raul, ELF and a.out are binary load
formats. Your reference to ELF and a.out releases should actually
be references to 1.X and 0.93R6. 0.93R6 is a stable release and 1.X
is not, but this has nothing to do with the fact that one is a.out
and the other ELF. All of the upgrading snafus that I have seen
discussed so far have to do with the difficulty in upgrading shared
libraries without breaking something in the process. These are
standard upgrading problems, and have nothing to do with ELF.
Yes and no. Aside from the issues of dynamic libraries and bfd code
there's little visible difference between elf and a.out.
The problem, as I see it, is that we've tied the 1.X release to the
elf libraries. We didn't have to do that. Since we have, the 1.X
release won't be stable till all of the libraries have been upgraded
and all of the packaes have been upgraded. That has an elegance and
efficiency to it, but pushes hard against our goal of "incremental
upgradeability".
I'm mostly being paranoid and overly conservative here -- but until
every dynamic library and development tool has been upgraded to fully
support elf, I find myself attributing the instabilities of 1.1 to the
elf upgrade requirement. Also, I'm wondering if we're going to have
to have Ian Jackson do another month's work on dpkg before it's really
trivial to upgrade libraries like we're requiring.
Note that mostly what I'm talking about is a slightly different
approach -- have a place to store a.out binaries, and recommend people
upgrading from a.out to elf have a working system with complete
run-time support for both for 1.1. Elf-only can be for the
adventurous and for later debian releases. It's not like I'm asking
for the development of new tools or such...
--
Raul
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