Re: Recent removal of a.out and COFF support for sparc

From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
To: John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>
Cc: Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>,
	binutils@sourceware.org,
	The development of GNU GRUB <grub-devel@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Recent removal of a.out and COFF support for sparc
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2018 07:20:37 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180808142037.GK2432@adacore.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4206dacb-2f78-a860-99dd-cffac1227510@physik.fu-berlin.de>

> Again, I understand the problem, it's not the first time I am having
> such a discussion. There was a similar one regarding POWER5 support
> in Golang [1] and the SPE backend in gcc [2].
> 
> The problem is just that we are talking about code here that people
> are actively using so I'm not sure what the alternatives are.

I only see two alternatives:

  1. Someone has enough interest to step up and maintain the code;
  2. Use an older version of binutils.

I think option (2) is a good option. It might mean that your host
system doesn't have that option out of the box, but you can still
build an older version of binutils separately. We do this all
the time so as to avoid depending on the host distribution to
determine what version of binutils we use.

-- 
Joel