Re: New binutils for kernel

[Karsten Merker <karsten@excalibur.cologne.de>]

On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 04:29:59PM +0200, Ralf Baechle wrote:

[requiring binutils 2.13]]

> Yep.  It won't hurt most of us kernel hackers very much but in particular
> the distribution people may want to comment.

Well, I guess that covers me :-).

Debian Woody, the current stable Debian release (AFAIK the only full-blown
distribution for Linux/mips that targets at "normal users" and not only at
developers) ships with binutils 2.12.90.0.1. As the Debian policy requires
that no new program versions are to be introduced for the stable release,
Debian will not be able to switch to binutils 2.13 there. Bugfixes for
packages in the release are accepted, but not new upstream versions; so to
get any fixes in, they would need to be backported to binutils 2.12.

For the unstable distribution (currently binutils 2.12.90.0.15), switching
to binutils 2.13 should IMHO be possible in a reasonable timeframe, if it
does not break other things. Caveat: as Debian requires all 11 released
architectures to be in sync, any new version would have to work properly on
_all_ supported platforms. The decision about introducing a new version of a
package into Debian is taken by the package maintainer, so I am going to ask
him about his plans.

Regards,
Karsten
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