The branch time for the 2.44 release is approaching

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Benjamin,

> I would love to see
> https://inbox.sourceware.org/binutils/20241217152746.98360-1-benjamin.drung@canonical.com/
> landed. It adds support for percent-encoded JSON in --package-metadata
> to gold. The equivalent patch for ld landed weeks ago. It would be nice
> to have ld and gold get the same feature in the upcoming release.

I am not going to approve or block this, since I am not really
a gold aficionado, but if another global maintainer wants to
step and review the patch then I have no problems with that.

Long term however we are planning to deprecate gold.  To that
end the 2.44 release is going to be the first where the gold
sources are provided in their own separate tarball and not in
the standard binutils tarball.

Cheers
   Nick