Re: ELF (Important, espc. f/ developers)
In message <[🔎] 199507281208.MAA07066@ind302bb.wi.leidenuniv.nl>, J.H.M.Dassen writ
es:
>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.
Unfortunately, I fall in the middle. I don't use canned distributions,
but I'm not a hard-core developer, either.
>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.
That sounds like more ELF blue-sky to me. The line is something
to the effect of ELF will be transparent, painless, help you in all these
great ways, etc., etc. However, the current reality is that it just ain't
so. As I have found out, the transition is currently *NOT* painless.
>Could you please indicate whether you used the Debian ELF packages,
>or followed the "move_to_elf" document, or used another transition
>path?
Followed move_to_elf, as much as one can. It's pretty terse.
>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*).
I've never claimed that there don't exist working ELF systems,
I said that I've never actually seen one.
>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.
I avoid C++ like the plague, myself. Every version n-1 of g++ is
horribly broken, while every version n is supposed to be fixed and great.
This has been going on for quite a while.
>- 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.
I was using 5.0.9.
>- deprecated C code, e.g. "extern char* malloc".
Does this look deprecated to you:
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("hello, world\n");
}
[K&R II, p7]
It'll compile on my system, but the linker spews unresolved
references to __strtol_internal at me.
Maybe it's just me. I've come to believe that Murphy's spirit lives
on inside my system the way wierd things happen sometimes. But if I followed
the instructions and end up with something that can't compile the infamous
"Hello, World" program, then it seems to me that something is very wrong.
At the least, the transition is still not painless enough that I think it
is appropriate to ask that every package maintainer (getting back to how
this relates to Debian) install the ELF tools on their systems and start
making ELF versions of things. I think it is currently far more prudent to
continue making Debian a.out wrt packages and to focus the attention on
making a hybrid a.out/ELF development environment for Debian that installs
and *works* without any surprises, THEN ask the developers to start using
that environment.
-Craig
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