Re: More code removal, mips ecoff support

[mike stump <mrs@windriver.com>]

> From: Eric Christopher <echristo@redhat.com>
> To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Date: 06 Dec 2001 15:14:32 -0800

> I'm looking at current OSs that support ecoff on mips or any objections
> to removing the ecoff support from the backend. Anyone?

It might be interesting to to contemplate annoucing the desupporting
of all non-elf system, and removing all non-elf code.  Before that
could be done, we'd need to run a user survey for months and months to
collect user opinion.  This would help consolidate everyone towards
elf, if they had been dragging their feet.

The theory would be, generate elf everywhere, and if the end user OMF
is different in the end, have them objcopy (extending objcopy as
necessary) from elf to the format they want.

A limitation would be, things like link once sections and a.out.  You
would have to objcopy fully resolved non-relocatable files to be a.out
files, one, in general could not just copy a single .o elf file, to a
single .o a.out file.  Also, binutils doesn't always copy relocs
correctly, thus, it would either have to be fixed, or again, one would
have to copy fully linked files.