Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/04/19/06:44:31
On Thu, 16 Apr 1998, Paul Derbyshire wrote:
> That isn't what is annoying me. What is annoying me is how certain seemingly
> critical features are made available only on certain platforms that are
> preferentially treated, and the documentations all either imply or
> overtly say otherwise!
Come on, Paul, you are around enough time to know better!
As the Binutils maintainer explained, the problem is not with certain
platforms, it is with certain object code formats. ELF (which isn't
specific to Linux) supports this feature while COFF (used by DJGPP,
SunOS and some others) does not. There's no Linux preference and no
DJGPP discrimination here; it's just that nobody has bothered to
submit patches which would make this feature work with COFF. If
somebody would submit such patches, I'd presume they'd be included
right away.
This is free software run by volunteers. As such, the volunteers who
run it get to determine the priorities in getting certain improvements
done. If you have your own agenda of different preferences, you are
free to make the changes and submit the patches. Posting angry
messages (and to the wrong forum) will get you nowhere.
As far as I can see, there are two *practical* ways to have this
feature work in DJGPP:
1) Convert DJGPP to use ELF instead of COFF.
IMHO, this is a huge project which involves porting a lot of code
and rewriting lots of other code written specifically for DJGPP.
For starters, the stub loader (that 2KB-long program prepended to
every DJGPP program) needs to be rewritten.
2) Make template instantiation work with COFF.
I think this is a much easier way, and I would guess the Binutils
maintainer can help you through this (if you ask him nicely
enough ;-).
It would be great to see somebody who would pick this job and make the
small (too small, IMHO) group of DJGPP contributors a bit larger.
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