BSD bintools (Part I)

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.

• 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.

ar(1) has been committed to FreeBSD

• 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 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).

ar-20080302.tgz elfcopy-20080227.tgz

This project is part of the ElfToolChain project.