Any a.out users?

[Konstantin Belousov]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 01:04:42PM -0400, Ed Maste wrote:
> 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?

There is also ldd(1) to clean if doing such cleanup.

I agree with the statement that if you need to do anything that requires
ldd/ldconfig for a.out, you really need to have the chroot with FreeBSD
2.2.x world around.