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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!news.sprintlink.net!helena.MT.net!nate From: nate@trout.sri.MT.net (Nate Williams) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: ELF Date: 25 Dec 1995 21:20:07 GMT Organization: SRI Intl. - Montana Operations Lines: 30 Message-ID: <4bn4i7$g0j@helena.MT.net> References: <4avq5m$7rk@complete.org> <4bghlm$7q3@pell.pell.chi.il.us> Reply-To: "Nate Williams" <nate@sneezy.sri.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: trout.sri.mt.net In article <4bghlm$7q3@pell.pell.chi.il.us>, Orc <orc@pell.chi.il.us> wrote: [ What is ELF? ] > It's a different executable format, to bite us Linux users who >have foolishly kept old binaries around. It's supposed to make >creating mountains of shared libraries easy, and this Linux user >hopes that FreeBSD won't convert to it because easy to make shared >libraries may lead to a MS-Windows like proliferation of them. The funny thing is that building shlibs under FreeBSD has been simple from day one. We already went through the 'everything should be a shlib' growing pain already, and are now only making libraries shared which (we think) make sense to be shared. Many folks in the Linux camp love ELF mainly for this feature (since none of the other advantage of ELF are usable yet) and have been trying to convert the BSD's to it because of the ease of building shlib, never realizing the the BSD implemention *always* made it easy to build them. As a matter of fact, the command line parameters are almost *exactly* the same. You could write a Makefile that was portable to both OS's to build shared libraries fairly trivially. Nate -- nate@sneezy.sri.com | Research Engineer, SRI Intl. - Montana Operations nate@trout.sri.MT.net | Loving life in God's country, the great state of work #: (406) 449-7662 | Montana. home #: (406) 443-7063 | A fly pole and a 4x4 Chevy truck = Heaven on Earth