elf, a.out and debian 1.*

[Raul Miller <rdm@tad.micro.umn.edu>]

I have a fairly radical proposal:

How about supporting both a.out AND elf in debian 1.*?

Yes, it's bigger and bulkier, but there's a good reason for this:

(*) ELF is not quite ready for prime time.

We're seeing a shadow of this in the difficulties we encounter
designing a smoothly upgradeable system.

In my opinion, we should be able to distinguish between a.out and elf
binaries much like we should be able to distinguish between binaries
for different architectures.  Furthermore, this whole concept of
introducing a sharp break between system state A and system state B
(with no midde ground) sharply contrasts with our desire to provide a
smoothly upgradeable system.

I'm afraid that if we don't allow both a.out and elf binaries for
version 1.0, for most significant packages, we're introducing a lot of
extra work and delay in getting the system stable.  Yes, it will take
more disk space -- especially on the debian archive -- but that seems
a small sacrifice if it enables system stability for debian 1.* in the
near future.

And, yes, I know ELF is almost ready -- but ...  I don't think we
should require that 1.1 be pure elf.  This sort of requirement isn't
going to solve any problem for us -- at best it masks difficulties in
upgrading from 0.93B6.

My $0.02.

-- 
Raul