Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!hp-pcd!hpfcso!mjs From: mjs@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM (Marc Sabatella) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: Switching from Sun to HP: some general questions Message-ID: <7370377@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM> Date: 22 Apr 91 21:25:33 GMT References: Organization: Hewlett-Packard, Fort Collins, CO, USA Lines: 34 Re: difficulties porting Gnu Emacs You may be referring to the patched crt0.s you need, not any patch for the assembler per se. See, these Gnu folks don't adhere to standards, and think that because they wrote an assembly version of the system-dependent startup code for BSD or whatever, that it should work on other systems? Baloney. You aren't supposed to be mucking with startup code. Same thing happened when Sun changed their startup conventions when they to shared libraries at 4.0. Software that was written to not depend on system dependent things like startup code or BSD-isms that aren't part of the Unix *standards* like SVID, Posix, etc will port with little or no difficult. >> I didn't know there was a standard for object formats... unless you >> define standard as "Version 7 + various hacks" or "SunOS"? > >Yes, there is a "standard" format. It's called COFF (Common Object File >Format). You can expect to see more of it. I know that some of HP's embedded >processor development tools use it, and my SparcStation has a man page... Oh, you mean the format that AT&T has now dumped in favor of "Elf"? No, there is no standard. At best, COFF was once a "de facto" standard, there are fewer and fewer systems that use it. >So, it's gradually becoming *the* standard. Quite the opposite - "Elf" may be the AT&T standard of the future. Except that OSF is promoting something they call "Rose", based on Mach-o... -------------- Marc Sabatella (marc@hpmonk.fc.hp.com) Disclaimers: 2 + 2 = 3, for suitably small values of 2 Bill and Dave may not always agree with me