From: Shawn Hargreaves <Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: COFF obsolete, let's port to Elf for version 3
Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 20:36:56 +0100
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Ruiter de M writes:
>I'm not that convinced that this incompatibility is unacceptable. If
>this ELF-thing is being worked on it will be for DJGPP-v3 I guess, and
>considering the incompatibilities between v1 and v2 this
>incompatibility might be justified.

I think it is a bad thing to make changes that will break any programs
which used to compile, if there is any possible alternative to that. 

Historically, the transition from djgpp 1.x to v2 did a brilliant job of
preserving backward compatibility, even though the operating environment
changed so drastically and the libc was totally rewritten. For example,
when I converted my early Allegro code to djgpp v2, I only needed to
make a few small changes to which header files I included!

In the case of ELF label prefixes, this seems to be a choice between
exact compatibility with the standard, or compatibility with the
existing body of djgpp code. If we were to bend the rules a bit and keep
the underscores, this would perhaps require a few tweaks to tools like
GDB, but I don't think anything too terrible would happen (the files
could not be mixed with ELF objects from other systems, but that is very
unlikely to work in any case :-) 

IMHO it is more important to maintain full compatibility with existing
programs, but of course this decision must ultimately be made by whoever
actually does the work of adding ELF support...


--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"Miracles are nothing if you've got the wrong intentions" - Mike Keneally