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

[Gunther Nikl <gnikl at justmail dot de>]

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> I would therefore like to ask to start a discussion about a potential
> reversal of this commit as I don't think we can forgo being able to
> build a bootloader on sparc/sparc64.

> Also, since m68k is still very actively maintained (there is even
> LLVM support in the works now) and since AmigaOS uses COFF, I would
> to ask for the a.out and COFF support for m68k to be reinstated
> as well [3].

COFF was used by AMIX but this system is dead for a very long time.
I take it with AmigaOS you refer to AmigaOS/m68k? FYI, the native object
code and executable format of AmigaOS/m68k is HUNK. However, the GCC
port for AmigaOS used and still uses a.out objects. Initially because
then only the linker had to modified to output HUNK executables.
Today the binutils port for AmigaOS has support to create HUNK objects
with gas, but this requires the m68k-amigaoshunk target triplet. The
AmigaOS BFD backend has linker support to use a.out and/or HUNK objects
as input files to create HUNK executables.
FWIW, there is no support for AmigaOS in the official FSF repositories
for binutils and GCC.

Regards,
Gunther