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Re: [MiNT] obsolete aout binutils?
Hi,
It's a real pity than I'm not a system coder otherwise I would
have made
something :-/
I'm not a "system coder" either. But why not try to become one? I
always wanted to contribute something useful to an operating system.
Where should we start? Becoming a "system coder" needs a lot of
knowledge. Even though many of use do (or did) studies in computer
science, the existing projects (linux kernel, GCC, binutils,
freemint, ...) are so huge, so its very hard to get along with the
source code, get an overview of the different parts and how they work
together.
At the moment I just scratched the surface of some of these projects
(binutils, GCC) and I have no idea of a good way to understand their
source code/modules.
Guido, Franck, Draco, Patrice.. Any help/code will be *very very
much*
apprecied by all the community.
The most important is no knowledge will be lost if these contributors
stop contributing.
Yeah... seriously. Do you guys want money? I can give you money! ;)
Thats still no solution: Money can't really pay up for the time
contributors invest. As long as there are no fulltime "MiNT
programmers", money can't change the world. All contributors have a
private life and need to decide how much time they want to "invest"
for Atari and how much for their family. And (at least for me) no
money can change the balance!
I agree with guido about the binary format. If there's no true
advantage than by all means we should keep our current format since
you
can still make a mintlib program that runs under tos/magic.
Keeping the old format will force us to stay with GCC 2.95.x
The problem with the current binary format starts appearing when we
want to compile a decent GCC compiler with decent binutils. Or should
we stop using GCC? I think this is no option.
Two options exist:
-adapt current binutils to support Atari format. (I think only Guido
has the knowledge.)
-adapt the kernel to support the ELF binary format. (The ELF support
is well tested...)
But in that case IIRC gas has a bug that needs fixed or something of
that nature because it's not generating the relocation information,
presumably because of poor testing by other users.
Yes... we should start working on binutils improvements. How can I help?
Philipp