Re: [PATCH] Remove eu-ld and unused code.

[Mark Wielaard <mjw@redhat.com>]

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Hi Ulrich,

On Wed, 2016-07-06 at 18:04 -0400, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 5:10 PM, Mark Wielaard <mjw@redhat.com> wrote:
> > Nobody has hacked on eu-ld in a very long time. It didn't really work.
> > And we didn't install it by default in the spec file. Remove sources,
> > the build rules and any (now) unused code.
> 
> Wrong.  I have worked on it and this is my code after all.  You just,
> without asking, claimed ownership anyway.  This is the only linker,
> I'm aware of, which is aimed to be used in library form which was one
> of the design decisions.

Yes, you did a lot of work on it. And yes, it does have an unique
design. Thanks. But your last commit to it was 8 years ago. Since then
people have only patched it up to fix build issues. There are no
testcases for it. And we do get reports from people who do install it
and find it not working. While it does have great potential, if nobody
is working on it or using it, then it is just a drag on maintenance.

The direct reason for removing it now is because various projects found
some use for the string table code which I wanted to rework. This code
is of course used a lot in the linker. But given that nobody actively
uses or works on the linker and we have no tests for it, it seemed
better to remove the (unused) code now than to pretend we keep what is
there working.

The code is of course not really gone. It will be in the git repository
history and can be resurrected once people actively work on it again.
All elfutils development is done openly through this mailinglist.

Cheers,

Mark