Re: Recent removal of a.out and COFF support for sparc

[Richard Earnshaw (lists)]

On 08/08/18 15:20, Joel Brobecker wrote:
>> Again, I understand the problem, it's not the first time I am having
>> such a discussion. There was a similar one regarding POWER5 support
>> in Golang [1] and the SPE backend in gcc [2].
>>
>> The problem is just that we are talking about code here that people
>> are actively using so I'm not sure what the alternatives are.
> 
> I only see two alternatives:
> 
>   1. Someone has enough interest to step up and maintain the code;
>   2. Use an older version of binutils.
> 

3. Use a post-link conversion tool to generate an a.out image from the
ELF binary.

> I think option (2) is a good option. It might mean that your host
> system doesn't have that option out of the box, but you can still
> build an older version of binutils separately. We do this all
> the time so as to avoid depending on the host distribution to
> determine what version of binutils we use.
>