Using binutils with all target enabled

[Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar at gmail dot com>]

Hi,

I'm playing with binutils trunk and it would seems that many tools are
not usable when built with --enable-targets=all.

nm fails with:

all-targets-nm: /linux-2.6/lib/atomic64.o: File format is ambiguous
all-targets-nm: Matching formats: elf32-littlemips
elf32-littlemips-vxworks elf32-tradlittlemips

ar is unable to generate archive index when asked to (tracked down to
an expected failure bfd_check_format_matches() after having read its
associated comment), which leads to ld being unable to use the
archives. ranlib does not work either. I did not get along the other
tool, but I'd expect similar failure.

I'd have hoped that specifying the the format explicits would have
been possible, but very few program seems to support such options.
Actually, only objdump (maybe others) accepts a '-b' flags.

Is this a known limitation of binutils built with --enable-targets=all
? If so, what can be done to fix this ? I'm particularly thinking of a
standard, binutils-wide, flag to pass the expected format.

Thanks in advance,
 - Arnaud