Re: ELF (Important, espc. f/ developers)
Craig wrote:
> When I recently installed the latest ELF-friendly everything,
> including the latest non-alpha binutils, libc, and gcc, I ended up
> with a system that couldn't linu *anything* (ELF or a.out). When I
> sent a message to linux-gcc describing my problem, it went effectively
> to /dev/null.
Craig, I'll admit that linux-gcc is not very useful to get help
with the transition to ELF. However, linux-gcc is ment for the
developers only, i.e. those who really, really know what they are
doing. For normal users, it is better to wait for the standard
distributions, like Debian, to switch to ELF.
Debian has not switched to ELF yet, but we are testing and
if necessary patching sources to compile with the ELF utils.
The Debian ELF utils are explicitly packaged as not to interfere
with the a.out utils, making a smooth transition possible.
Could you please indicate whether you used the Debian ELF packages,
or followed the "move_to_elf" document, or used another transition
path?
> I am assuming that the ELF transition is easy and great if it works,
> but I think that MANY people completely fail to take into account the case
> where it doesn't work. I've *never* seen a working ELF system, and I work
> with a number of people who use Linux. They've never seen ELF work, either.
> This is not a good sign, IMO.
My system is 75% ELF (25% is X, for which I don't have the space to
recompile it). It is using the ELF tools as prepackaged by David Engel
(ftp.debian.org/debian/project/experimental/elf*).
Many of the problems people blame on "ELF" are actually problems
with
- the newer version of gcc. gcc-2.7.0 adheres to the newest C++ standard,
resulting in a changed scope for variables and possibly other changes.
- a bleeding edge libc. The Debian elf-libc package is 5.0.9, which
has proven to be very stable. Libc is in a state of flux w.r.t.
the incorporation of threads and ncurses.
- deprecated C code, e.g. "extern char* malloc".
Greetings,
Ray
--
POPULATION EXPLOSION Unique in human experience, an event which happened
yesterday but which everyone swears won't happen until tomorrow.
- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan
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