Any a.out users?

Ed Maste emaste at freebsd.org
Fri Mar 13 17:04:57 UTC 2020


While looking at other things we came across ldconfig's a.out support,
which hasn't been used by anything in the FreeBSD base system in ~2
decades.

I know there are (or at least recently were) folks using a.out
binaries on contemporary FreeBSD. Most likely statically linked
proprietary software. I'd be curious to know if anyone is still using
this.

As far as ldconfig goes I don't see the value in generating a.out
hints; if someone is using a.out shared libraries (from FreeBSD 2.x)
it seems that they can also just use FreeBSD 2.x ldconfig to generate
the hints file. Is there any reason we shouldn't deprecate ldconfig
a.out support?


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