====== BSD bintools (Part I) ======
===== Project Benefits =====
This project plans to re-implement part of the GNU
binutils based on the libelf and libarchive libraries.
It will bring %%FreeBSD%% a BSD Licensed toolchain for
processing ELF binary file. First part of the project, which is
scheduled to complete within this summer, mainly concentrate on
re-implementing tools including ar(1), ranlib(1), objcopy(1), strip(1)
and composing corresponding manual pages.
===== Deliverables =====
  * Implement ar(1), ranlib(1), strip(1), objcopy(1) based on the libelf library. The goal of the re-implementation is to at least provide identical functionality in ELF binary processing to the GPL'ed counterpart. 
  * Manual pages for these tools.
===== Status =====
ar(1) has been committed to %%FreeBSD%%
===== Progress =====
  * A test suite was finished.
  * Tarballs for these utils are available for download. Please use with caution as they are still work-in-progress. Any feedback is appreciated. I will update these tarballs on weekly base.
  * A manual page for ar(1) was finished by JosephKoshy
  * A basic implementation of objcopy(1) and strip(1) was finished.
  * A basic implementation of ar(1) and ranlib(1) was finished. 
  * An "ar" extension to the [[http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/|libarchive]] library was finished. This extension provides basic (and experiment) support for reading and writing "ar" archives and will be the back-end of the new ar(1). 
===== Downloads =====
[[http://people.freebsd.org/~kaiw/distfiles/ar-20080302.tgz|ar-20080302.tgz]]
[[http://people.freebsd.org/~kaiw/distfiles/elfcopy-20080227.tgz|elfcopy-20080227.tgz]]
===== See Also =====
This project is part of the [[ElfToolChain]] project.