Re: backward/forward compatibility of binutils

[Mikhail Teterin <mi+kde@aldan.algebra.com>]

On Friday 07 July 2006 11:11, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
= It is an effort, and has roughly no benefit.

The benefits were mentioned even in this thread already -- to allow the same 
instance of bfd to be shared by multiple tools on a system. This is not just 
disk space, but also run-time memory consumption, tools build times, and ease 
and modularity of upgrading.

= BFD is an integral part of the tools that use it, not a clearly separated
= component.

Same is true for all "3rd party" libraries out there -- PNG, JPEG, TIFF, 
XML/EXPAT, LIBWWW -- you name it. All of them are only meaningful as parts of 
the applications that use them, and are equally clearly separated from them.

Yet _their_ authors are careful about API (and even ABI) compatibility -- and 
they are right.

I've been maintaining FreeBSD ports of 3rd-party software for years -- it is 
very annoying, when an application bundles its own version of a well-known 
and widely used package -- you are facing the wasted space, memory, 
bandwidth, and potential conflicts with the already installed versions.

Unfortunately, GNU toolchains and debuggers are like that, because keeping API 
compatibility is judged as "too much effort" by binutils developers...

	-mi