a.out questions

[Krister Walfridsson]

I'm in the process of porting binutils to NetBSD's a.out shared library
format, and I have a couple of questions...

In our exec header, there is a flag that tells if the code in the file
is position independent. Should I add this to the flags in BFD, or is 
this attribute obscure enough to keep only as private data in the a.out
backend?

Since I thought that our a.out format was close to sunos, I have based
my version on sunos.c. There are however two differences that are big 
enough to cause problems;

- The nlist pointed to by the dynamic_link structure isn't a nlist in
  NetBSD (it's a nlist with on word appended.) This does unfortunatly
  break (at least) aout_link_add_symbols() in aoutx.h

- Weak symbols are handled by setting a flag in the n_other field (instead
  of handling it in n_type that binutils does). This breaks the conversion 
  functions in aoutx.h.

Are there any hooks I have missed that can solve my problems? As far I can 
see, the hooks are present on a too high level, so I end up duplicating 
nearly the whole aoutx.h. Or should I try to add new hooks?


By the way, are this mailing list the correct place to discuss changes to
ld, or are there a ld list somewhere?

   /Krister