Hi Efraim,

The other day, I asked on IRC why it's OK for binutils-final to refer to
static-bash-for-glibc on powerpc architectures, like in commit
2da8fcfdee7cfde8110a68806f3c4d497f217fe5, but it isn't OK on other
architectures.  You said, "there's an extra file that's a bash script
specific to powerpc machines. I suppose we could just un-patch-shebang
it back to /bin/sh".  Thank you for taking the time to respond!

When I build binutils-final on powerpc64le-linux, I get this message:

output (`/gnu/store/n2ivj40h30wa55qwp9dazzfywqb6s6vz-binutils-2.34') is not allowed to refer to path `/gnu/store/vnshq5g4ghhbr6c3s69q9p8fp6hr0gpx-bootstrap-bi
naries-0'

Looks like the file in question is embedspu, and it does refer to sh
like you said:

marusich@suzaku:~$ grep -r /gnu/store/vnshq5g4ghhbr6c3s69q9p8fp6hr0gpx-bootstrap-binaries-0 /gnu/store/n2ivj40h30wa55qwp9dazzfywqb6s6vz-binutils-2.34
/gnu/store/n2ivj40h30wa55qwp9dazzfywqb6s6vz-binutils-2.34/bin/embedspu:#!/gnu/store/vnshq5g4ghhbr6c3s69q9p8fp6hr0gpx-bootstrap-binaries-0/bin/sh

Well, what's that script, anyway?  The first lines say:

#!/gnu/store/vnshq5g4ghhbr6c3s69q9p8fp6hr0gpx-bootstrap-binaries-0/bin/sh
# Embed an SPU ELF executable into a PowerPC object file.

OK, so yeah, it's probably necessary on various PowerPC architectures,
that seems clear now.  But would changing this to /bin/sh actually work?
If we changed the reference to /bin/sh, wouldn't it cause problems in
build environments, since /bin/sh isn't available there?

Anyway, I'm fine with making a change like
2da8fcfdee7cfde8110a68806f3c4d497f217fe5 for powerpc64le-linux, since it
clearly seems like a necessary reference on that architecture.  That's
probably what I'll do.

-- 
Chris