[Toybox] Is binutils neccessary?

[Rob Landley]

On 12/11/14 14:04, Isaac Dunham wrote:
> By the time we have a full-featured depmod, nm would be not much more
> work.
> A full POSIX ar (adequate for libraries) would also cover ranlib.
> strings is already done.
> size and strip are the main binutils tools in addition to those...

It's possible that binutils (ELF-only) is indeed within scope of toybox.
Not for the 1.0 release, but adding it on later: ELF is a fairly
standardized archive format? Sort of?

Modulo all the darn target dependencies, but then I haven't decided
strace isn't in scope for toybox either, and that's nothing BUT target
dependencies. (Again: post-1.0.)

But it's more in scope for qcc, and either way ONE of the two projects
needs a "make" implementation which is more work than the linker. And I
_do_ know that a C compiler is definitely out of scope for toybox. (Yes,
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c99.html is a
posix command. I don't care, it's out of scope. Even tinycc hardwired to
output 32 bit x86 code only was 100k of source, and I may be good at
programming as haiku but I'm not better than Fabrice Bellard...) So qcc
has to be a separate project...

On the other hand, I might add binutils bits to toybox for a while, and
then when qcc starts up go "all this is moving to qcc" and yank it back
out of toybox with a pointer to the other project? I dunno. I wouldn't
want users to lose funtionality but spliting a large package into
smaller packages has precedent. And keep in mind qcc is designed as one
binary that acts like cc, ld, cpp, as, nm, objdump, and so on depending
on what symlink you call it through, just like toybox.

I also note that qcc's linker should work with pcc and llvm (and even
gcc, if that's still around by then). If you want to use just part of
the project, that's ok. So "lives in toybox" vs "lives in qcc" is less
of a bright line there...

But again: it's not in the toybox 1.0 roadmap, and qcc doesn't start
before then unless somebody else does it for me. :) (Take my project
idea, please...)

Rob

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