Re: [Freemint-discuss] Bad news: a.out support for m68k is going to be removed from binutils

[Thorsten O. <ad...@th...>]

On Montag, 16. April 2018 15:33:24 CEST Mark Duckworth wrote:
> But why?  Is this is because they think nobody uses it or because it is
> holding back the binutils codebase?  If the former, we could push to
> keep it.

I think this is because nobody at FSF actively maintains it. And of course it 
is more work when doing general code changes that affect all targets. There 
was a question about this removal about a year ago already, now it has come 
true :(

As long as only binutils is affected, this not a real problem for us i think. 
It is unlikely that any new features are ported to a.out anyway, so we can 
just stick to the current (2.30) version. It will only become a problem if the 
compiler starts to spit out mnemonics that our assembler does not understand.

Another possibility is to add the removed parts back in our patch, as for now 
that should not be a big deal (we don't have to care about coff, or parts 
specific to other hosts; also the patches for the testsuite could be omitted 
since that part can never be run by a cross-compiler, and i think that it has 
not been run for a long time on real hardware.