Re: RFA: Document conventions for terminating query/set packet names

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>]

On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 11:13:47PM -0700, Jim Blandy wrote:
> It's my impression that renaming qPart will also affect existing stubs
> --- isn't that so?  From looking around, it seemed to me that there
> weren't too many implementations of qP, so I'm presuming that, if
> something is to be broken, that'd be the one to break.  But if you
> know that RedBoot is more widely installed in inaccessible places,
> then that's something I didn't realize.

Well, I don't know it, but I strongly suspect it.  I know we've gotten
boards from vendors with RedBoot flashed into them; and the life of
flashed boot monitors can be depressingly long.

Here's the deal with qPart as I see it: there is currently exactly one
OBJECT value defined, "auxv".  This only applies to hosted programs
running within an OS with an ELF interpreter, and in practice I think
it only applies to GNU/Linux and Solaris.  These are cases where the
stub is fairly easy to upgrade.

Now, once I get the qPart:features support merged, it'll be a different
story; that's primarily targeted at embedded stubs.  But it hasn't
happened yet and I only know of a handful of users, none of whom are
committed to the interface.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery