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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!wabbit.its.uow.edu.au!news.ci.com.au!newshost.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!news1.digital.com!decwrl!claris.claris.com!forum.apple.com!trib.apple.com!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: ELF support for FreeBSD ? Date: Fri, 15 Mar 1996 18:18:53 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 30 Message-ID: <314A250D.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org> References: <aak2.825887021@Ra.MsState.Edu> <4hgqn3$6oc@times.tfs.com> <4i9ekr$qc0@stealth.romoidoy.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE i386) To: H J Lu <hjl@gnu.ai.mit.edu> H J Lu wrote: > That is a common misconception among xxxxBSD users. Only > a few xxxBSD users know what ELF really is and what it can do. > Unfortunately, there are only a few. And the few that do still see _no clear advantage_ to migrating to it! C'mon, HJ - you of all people should know very well that migrating to ELF is hardly "free", and the Linux camp went through 10 kinds of hell in the process of going from a.out to ELF. There are even still a number of Linux people who don't even run with ELF, despite the fact that it's widely available. Given that it's a lot of work to change your ABI, we in the xxxBSD camps would need a _very clear reason_ to go through this much pain. It has nothing to do with the fact that ELF offers since nice features - we know it does - simply that the attraction of those features has to outweigh the pain of conversion or there's really no reason to do it. So far, none of the ELF advocates have been able to provide clear reasons for going to ELF that would outweigh the pain for us, so we don't do it. In other words, it's not ignorance that keeps us away from ELF, it's lack of ignorance as to how much such a transition would cost us. I guess one would have to be a tool hacker to be able to totally ignore the larger issues and still get away with it.. :-) -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project