Re: elf, a.out and debian 1.*
On Fri, 19 Jan 1996, William S. Gribble wrote:
> Raul writes:
> > I meant we should support parallel instances of a.out and elf binary
> > packages. Currently, we're pretty much oriented on having only one
> > instance of a package available. Until elf is really ready (which
> > means, stable api, tested on a wide variety of platforms, and stable
> > for a while) it could be a real lifesaver to be able to back off and
> > use a (hopefully) working a.out imlementation.
>
> I guess I'm a little out of the loop; I wasn't aware that ELF had problems
> with stability, especially at the level of its API. Are there problems
> that have come up with particular packages that have been determined to
> be ELF problems? If not, what makes you think there are stability problems?
Just some datapoints: I started my ELF conversion exactly one year ago.
And since april '95 I had a complete ELF system, build by debian source
packages with modifications made by me. Almost every package which came
out I recompiled. Some of the modifications are gone back into debian
packages or even upstream packages. Others have done the same. You will
hardly observe an error in released debian packages you can assign to ELF.
There *are* problems and differences between aout and ELF, but I think the
debian team is very far from cluelessness.
mfg
Rolf Rossius
PS: Yesterday I threw the aout personality out of my kernel and it
worked. Together with Al Longyear we are about to modularized these
and aout and ELF as binary formats will exchange their rolls.
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