rms@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Stallman) (05/05/88)
Someone says he has converted GAS to produce COFF. He said the changes were not very widespread, but he has not done anything about the debugging information. If someone does make GAS able to substitute fully for the sysV assembler, I would be interested in using the changes only if they do not make GAS significantly harder to maintain. I think this is not the right way to support GCC on sysV. It would be better to make sysV look more like a GNU system. This involves two steps: * Write a translator which will convert a library object module from COFF to BSD format. This isn't terribly hard because there is no debugging information. * Modify GNU ld to add a minimal amount of stuff to the front of a BSD format file to make it executable by the kernel. The symbol table will remain in BSD format. This should be very little change. * Modify GDB to read such files. This should be very little change. Now you can replace all the software for compilation, etc., with the GNU software.