Re: binutils snapshots no longer build gas

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@cygnus.com>]

	   GAS does have some limitations with respect to XCOFF support
   including the problem with included files which you mention, but I do not
   understand why that is important enough to disable the AIX XCOFF
   configuration of GAS.  Some support is better than no support: IBM XAS still
   is distributed with AIX 4.1 so one can use that if one encounters the
   debugging information limitation.

I think it's a question of which works better, and what the default
should be for naive users.  If the native assembler is going to work
significantly better, we can't really justify shipping to customers
paying for the end result a toolchain using the inferior GNU one
instead.  If no native assembler exists (e.g., for embedded targets)
then using the GNU one makes sense.

You can of course override the top-level configure.in script and use
gas on such machines if you really want to.  Even better, you can do
that, and then send in patches to make gas and bfd work really well on
XCOFF. :-)

But does building and installing gas by default really gain the
average user anything that makes up for the problems in debugging?
Apparently Jim Kingdon -- one of the gdb maintainers -- didn't think
so.

Ken