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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

On 08/08/2018 11:27 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
> 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.

Yep. So you cut out support for the targets sparc/coff and sparc/a,out, the
latter being the target format used by the OBP firmware used on nearly every
SPARC machine.

> 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.  

The SPARC OBP firmware is a target that does not support ELF which is why
it is no longer possible to build binaries for this target despite being
it an actively used target.

> Nor are there plans to trim the target set of gcc down to "current mainstream targets", whatever that might mean.

Well, yes, I just linked one of those gcc targets - the e500 target - earlier
today. The m68k target in gcc is also constantly under threat because of the
planned cc0 removal. Both the e500 and the m68k targets in gcc are actively
used. The m68k target is still very popular despite its age.

Adrian

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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