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quality of IA-64 bits in 2.11

David O'Brien obrien@FreeBSD.org
Thu Oct 25 08:44:00 GMT 2001 
On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 11:21:01AM +0930, Alan Modra wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 05:35:08PM -0700, David O'Brien wrote:
> > 
> > H.J.'s releases don't really apply to us.
> 
> This isn't a flippant question.  Why not?

Not taken as such.

As is well known, H.J. releases are marked as only being appropriate for
Linux systems.  I asked him once if maybe I should use his releases (this
was before 2.10.0 and the faster release cycle).  He commented that he
can only really concentrate on Linux issues with his releases.  So if
they world for FreeBSD fine, if not I would be on my own.  Back when I
looked at one of his releases, there were some Linux'isms I did not like.
I cannot remember what they were now.

With the FSF Binutils, I at least have a means of making direct change.
I do not want to go into the Binutils development business w/in the
FreeBSD source tree.  Otherwise why have the Binutils development group
we have here?  For years FreeBSD had its own version of as and ld.[*]
Over time our tools became more and more out of date and were missing
features that had become expected in "modern" as/ld's.  I strongly do not
want to return to those days.  Every Binutils change I make in the
FreeBSD tree has to be strongly justified and as you've seen in the past,
I work to get FreeBSD's needs taken care of here.

[*] Due to FreeBSD being a.out at the time, the FSF developers did not
want to take in our changes.  OpenBSD for instance, is still using a 1.x
assembler on sparc.

-- 
-- David  (obrien@FreeBSD.org)
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