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

[Paul Koning <paulkoning@comcast.net>]

> On Aug 8, 2018, at 5:23 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> 
> On 08/08/2018 08:27 PM, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Aug 2018, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> 
>>>> Gold supports only a small fraction of the platforms that BFD does,
>>> 
>>> Which of the platforms that are still relevant for commercial applications
>>> are supported by BFD which are not supported by Gold?
>>> 
>>> As far as I know, Gold support x86*, POWER*, ARM*, s390* and MIPS* which
>>> covers all of the targets that distributions like Fedora, openSUSE and
>>> Debian consider as supported release architectures.
>> 
>> We have dozens of bare metal targets which only have support in BFD.
> 
> Which is my whole point. If you remove all these targets from BFD, what
> would be the point of still using it over Gold or LLVM's LLD?
> 
> It's the same argument I see with gcc. One of it's huge selling points
> is the plethora of targets it supports. If you go ahead now and cut
> out all targets except for the current mainstream targets, you are
> removing one huge advantage that gcc has over LLVM.

I don't quite understand.

The original discussion seemed to be the removal of the a.out and coff output options specifically for sparc.  In other words, a target which used to support ELF along with some other formats now supports ELF only.

There are also targets that do not support ELF.  And I know of no plans to remove those targets, or to remove the a.out support they rely on.  I'm maintainer for one of them.  Nor are there plans to trim the target set of gcc down to "current mainstream targets", whatever that might mean.

	paul