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

[Alan Modra <amodra at gmail dot com>]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2018 at 05:56:58PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On 08/07/2018 12:51 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> > binutils/bfd recently removed a.out and COFF support for sparc [1].
> I just noticed that COFF/a.out support for MIPS was removed as well
> and shortly after restored since it seems that GRUB also needs
> COFF/a.out support on MIPS.
> 
> So, can we have COFF/a.out support back, at least for sparc*?

I would rather remove all AOUT support.  AOUT as a format has been
obsolete since the advent of ELF in the 1990s.  See for example
J. Arnold "ELF: An Object File to Mitigate Mischievous Misoneism", In
Proc. of the Summer USENIX Conference, 1990.
COFF should have died too..

The sparc target obsolescence happened here:
https://sourceware.org/ml/binutils/2016-09/msg00184.html

You've had quite a bit of warning, but I guess you just built binutils
with --enable-obsolete, or stayed with older binutils.  Well, older
binutils are likely to be better for AOUT anyway.  So what's to
prevent you using older binutils for sparc-aout?

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM