PATCH: Very interesting IA64 gas bug

[Jim Wilson]

On Sun, 2003-06-08 at 13:32, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> In general, mind you, I think it's time to toss BFD and write an ELF
> specific assembler and linker.  That would be faster and easier to
> maintain.

See Drepper's elfutils package in RHL 9.  He has already done a lot of
work in this direction.  Unfortunately, there are some political
issues.  This uses the Open Source License not the GPL, and Red Hat is
retaining ownership instead of contributing it to the FSF.  There may
also be other issues.

There is unfortunately one target that still insists on using COFF, and
it is a target we can't ignore: Microsoft Windows.  I believe everyone
else uses ELF in their most recent OS releases.  So for the moment, we
still need bfd because of Microsoft.

Jim