Re: weird limitation on the system's binutils

On Saturday 01 July 2006 07:55, Peter Jeremy wrote:
= IMHO, the FreeBSD base system should provide tools for doing native
= development - anything beyond that belongs in ports.  Given that
= binutils supports quite an extensive range of targets (of the order of
= 100), building them all is impractical and a waste of resources for
= virtually everyone who uses FreeBSD.

I would agree with this myself, except that anything in the ports would have 
to _duplicate_ or replace the system one. All of it -- not even just bfd -- 
because it is all linked statically.

The overhead of even a 100 extra "bfd vectors" for all is much smaller, than 
the the full duplication overhead for those, who want to disassemble 
an "obscure" object format -- or even one from another FreeBSD platform.

We support multiple human languages, each one needed by relatively few people.

> My reading of contrib/binutils suggests that files for targets not
> related to FreeBSD are in the exclude/delete list and aren't imported
> into the FreeBSD repository.

They are all here, although there are a lot fewer than 100 of them:

	echo /usr/src/contrib/binutils/bfd/*-* | wc -w
	      74

> libbdf.a is built by /usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/binutils/libbfd/Makefile.
> That should be a fairly simple change to arrange for it to build and
> install the .so as well.

Installing both libbfd-s certainly would be a good start... As things stand, 
every port needing it -- including various different compilers -- builds it 
own version. This is, largely, explained by the GNU's stupidity of bundling a 
different version with each tool (gdb, compiler), but the bundled bfds are 
not THAT incompatible, and the system-installed version can include the 
compatible superset...

	-mi