Re: more on powerpc-rtems ar failure

[Joel Sherrill <joel@OARcorp.com>]

On Thu, 16 Apr 1998, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> Was this ar build with --enable-targets=all?  

Yes, I did build with --enable-targets=all.  I build the tools with a
script and that option has been in there a long time.

I have tried it again without the --enable-targets=all option and it is
already up to newlib.  So this must be the culprit.

> It's hard to recommend using such tools for general use.  There are too
> many ambiguities among different object file formats.  You should
> instead spell out the precise set of targets you want to support. 

I can see that it would be hard to figure it out.  There are a LOT of BFD
entries.  THis will probably speed up the build as well as reduce the size
of the executables.

We release have instructions and a script to build the tools for RTEMS
users, so please understand where the following questions are coming from.
When I delete --enable-targets=all, I am doing it for every RTEMS user. :)

Will taking the default result in getting all the formats for a particular
CPU?  I have tried to encourage the use of CPU-rtems for all users of CPU
and then have them use objcopy to produce the exact format required by a
board.   For example, does m68k-coff (aka m68k-rtems) also include
at least m68k-aout, srecords, binary -- with m68k-elf a plus.   On CPUs
with both big and little endian, does it get all the "same endian"
formats? 

For the powerpc-rtems at least, the list of default supported targets is
more than good enough.

I lean toward not specifying any targets since I have 10 RTEMS targets
already and couldn't figure out the exact list.  Not to mention I will
need to add two new ones soon -- there are ARM and H8 ports about ready to
be submitted.

> Still, ar ought to report a better error message, so there may be
> something different going on here.

Even if it had printed out something like "can't figure out the object
format of the library", it still would not tell me that it was
there was ambiguity because of "--enable-targets=all".

FWIW I can duplicate the problem using the same procedure on the
mips64orion-rtems target with the "-EL" option to gcc/as and the GNU
target of elf32-littlemips. 

> However, I can't recreate the problem using an ar configured for
> powerpc-eabi.

Probably without --enable-targets=all?

Thanks.  I have learned a lot this time.  I have wanted to treat the BFD
as black magic (which it is) but this has been enlightening.  

--joel