[Elftoolchain-developers] Short-term roadmap

[Joseph K. <jk...@us...>]

Hi,

I would like to open discussion on our short term roadmap: i.e.,
planning for our first release.  The goal of this release would be
to produce a tarball that the other projects could start looking
at.

It seems to me that we have the following tasks need to be completed
before we can have any kind of release:

1) Bring libelf to the point where ar(1) can be implemented using
   it:
   1.1) libelf needs to be able to create ar(1) archives [Task #149800]
   1.2) libelf needs to handle BSD format ar(1) archives.  Currently
        it only understands SysV format archives. [Task #149801]

   These tasks would be owned by me, unless someone else wants to take
   them up.

2) Then we would need to retarget ar(1) to use the new libelf instead
   of libarchive. [Task #149994] (owned by jkoshy or kaiwang27)

3) Then a sanity-check porting pass to port ar(1) to other OSes.
 
`nm', `size' and `strings' run fine on NetBSD and FreeBSD.  I haven't
looked at `elfcopy' on NetBSD yet but do not anticipate trouble
either.

So the questions are:

- Do you think we should defer the first release till we have other
  tools ready?  If so, which tools would these be?

- If the idea of a release is ok, what OSes do we target for the first
  release?

Also: do you know of any organization offering a "build farm" with
different OSes?  I'd love to have a collection of buildbot/bitten
slaves that could build our source tree on different OSes
automatically.

Koshy