merging gas into binutils?

[Michael Meissner <meissner@osf.org>]

| 
| A suggestion has been made to merge gas into the binutils package,
| meaning there'd be only one distribution.  It's an idea that's
| occurred to me before.  And of course it's what I'm already doing for
| the nightly snapshots, though they're going under the name `gas' at
| the moment rather than `binutils'.
| 
| That would make it about 2/3 the size of the current two packages,
| with bfd &c duplicated.  On the other hand, it means someone wanting
| to pick up gas alone would have to download a bit more.
| 
| The linker has got SunOS shared library support added (linking against
| them, not creating them), and other nifty new features.  So that at
| least is no longer an argument for using gas but not the rest of
| binutils (specifically the linker).  Offhand I don't know of a
| situation where you'd want binutils but not gas, though there may be
| one or two targets supported by binutils but not gas.  And of course
| people would still have the option of only installing some of the
| programs distributed as `binutils'.
| 
| Does anyone see a good reason why I shouldn't just combine them, and
| release `binutils 2.5, including assembler and linker' sometime?

I would say that ok, provided either the old gas tar files get removed
from prep, or a symlink is created from binutils-2.5.tar.gz to
gas-2.5.tar.gz is made.