From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ken Raeburn To: "David Edelsohn" Cc: gas2@cygnus.com, configure@cygnus.com Subject: Re: binutils snapshots no longer build gas Date: Mon, 24 Apr 1995 23:06:00 -0000 Message-id: <9504250606.AA05683@cujo.cygnus.com> References: <9504250358.AA51766@sandcastle.watson.ibm.com> X-SW-Source: 1995/msg00069.html 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