From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from list by lists.gnu.org with archive (Exim 4.71) id 1fnKRs-0006fF-1T for mharc-grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 08 Aug 2018 05:08:08 -0400 Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:43391) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1fnKRq-0006dK-7d for grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 08 Aug 2018 05:08:07 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1fnKRl-0003se-Sy for grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 08 Aug 2018 05:08:06 -0400 Received: from outpost1.zedat.fu-berlin.de ([130.133.4.66]:40413) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1fnKRl-0003oz-L8 for grub-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 08 Aug 2018 05:08:01 -0400 Received: from inpost2.zedat.fu-berlin.de ([130.133.4.69]) by outpost.zedat.fu-berlin.de (Exim 4.85) with esmtps (TLSv1.2:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:256) (envelope-from ) id <1fnKRj-0012qm-P7>; Wed, 08 Aug 2018 11:07:59 +0200 Received: from z92e7.pia.fu-berlin.de ([87.77.146.231] helo=[10.146.231.3]) by inpost2.zedat.fu-berlin.de (Exim 4.85) with esmtpsa (TLSv1.2:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:128) (envelope-from ) id <1fnKRj-001HAe-IP>; Wed, 08 Aug 2018 11:07:59 +0200 Subject: Re: Recent removal of a.out and COFF support for sparc To: Alan Modra Cc: binutils@sourceware.org, The development of GNU GRUB References: <2d2f1c2a-1715-1348-c35a-ad562a3acbb2@physik.fu-berlin.de> <27449274-9250-97a3-1ff9-8b9c818659d4@physik.fu-berlin.de> <20180808015529.GP26457@bubble.grove.modra.org> From: John Paul Adrian Glaubitz Message-ID: Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2018 11:07:58 +0200 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.9.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20180808015529.GP26457@bubble.grove.modra.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Originating-IP: 87.77.146.231 X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] [fuzzy] X-Received-From: 130.133.4.66 X-BeenThere: grub-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.21 Precedence: list List-Id: The development of GNU GRUB List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2018 09:08:07 -0000 On 08/08/2018 03:55 AM, Alan Modra wrote: >> So, can we have COFF/a.out support back, at least for sparc*? > > I would rather remove all AOUT support. AOUT as a format has been > obsolete since the advent of ELF in the 1990s. See for example > J. Arnold "ELF: An Object File to Mitigate Mischievous Misoneism", In > Proc. of the Summer USENIX Conference, 1990. > COFF should have died too.. Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that people are still using it. OpenBoot firmware requires the binary to be in a.out format and we're therefore stuck with that. It's not that we can change the hardware in retrospect. Also, while AOUT and COFF might be old in general, it does not mean that these formats completely vanish. There are still places where they are used, see for example Microsoft's PE binaries. And users might still want to be able to analyze binaries from various sources without having to dig out a specific version of binutils first. > The sparc target obsolescence happened here: > https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2016-09/msg00184.html Well, that question was asked on the binutils mailing list and I think it's a bit unfair to expect all downstreams to follow all upstream mailing lists. There is a plethora of very important upstream projects like the Linux kernel, binutils, gcc, systemd, OpenJDK, gdb and so on and so forth and trying to keep track of what all of these upstreams are doing is nearly impossible. > You've had quite a bit of warning, but I guess you just built binutils > with --enable-obsolete, or stayed with older binutils. Again, I think this is an unfair statement. It's simply not possible for downstreams to track all upstream projects. On the other hand, why does bfd even need to be reworked so much? Isn't the idea that people are eventually moving to elfutils or Gold anyway? > Well, older > binutils are likely to be better for AOUT anyway. So what's to > prevent you using older binutils for sparc-aout? Distributions usually don't allow multiple versions of the same package to be part of the same distribution. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913