*BSD News Article 34444


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
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From: sef@kithrup.com (Sean Eric Fagan)
Subject: Re: Wishlist: FreeBSD 2.0
Organization: Kithrup Enterprises, Ltd.
Message-ID: <CunJFK.82z@kithrup.com>
References: <777048964.AA03114@f74.n700.z6.ftn.air.org>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 23:47:43 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <777048964.AA03114@f74.n700.z6.ftn.air.org>,
Clarence Chu <Clarence.Chu@f132.n700.z6.ftn.air.org> wrote:
>I have a wishlist for the upcoming FreeBSD-2.0
>1) that the major number of shared library be '1' with minor number 
>   be increased to make previously compiled binaries to work

It'll be 2.0, I am pretty sure.

>2) Gcc-2.6X be incorporated so as to facilitate Fresco/X11R6

I don't know if this'll happen; previous versions of gcc were remarkably
unstable, and people have gotten rather wary.  Pity, that.

>4) .....long ( 6 years from AT&T anouncement ) awaited iBCS support.

iBCS2 support, at some level, will be there, most likely.  It's been
reported to run a version of Lotus 1-2-3 v1.0 and uSoft Word (version
unknown), and some niggling details are being cleared up.  At the moment,
though, I'm not sure how useful it will be, as you'd need to get shared
libraries from a SCO system.  One of the developers is compiling SCO
programs on his FreeBSD system using SCO's compiler tools -- pretty
impressive, really.

>5) cross compiler to ?????? processor can be made using the stock 
>   compiler.

There are two problems with doing that:  first, it increases the size of the
distribution considerably (have you ever *looked* at how large the
gcc/config tree is?!); second, it makes it harder to fit into the BSD build
tree.  For myself, I *like* that it uses a BSD-style Makefile, in the *bsd
releases, and I don't need a cross-compiler that often.  (When I do, I can
grab gcc and build it myself.)

Remember that a cross-compiler needs a cross-assembler, a cross-linker, and
cross-header files.  We're talking about between 10 and 60MBytes of
additional disk space, depending.