From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 3768 invoked by alias); 1 Dec 2003 20:50:33 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gcc-help@gcc.gnu.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: Sender: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org Received: (qmail 3666 invoked from network); 1 Dec 2003 20:50:30 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO panther.cs.ucla.edu) (131.179.128.25) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 1 Dec 2003 20:50:30 -0000 Received: from penguin.cs.ucla.edu (Penguin.CS.UCLA.EDU [131.179.64.200]) by panther.cs.ucla.edu (8.11.7p1+Sun/8.11.6/UCLACS-5.2) with ESMTP id hB1KoQ919316; Mon, 1 Dec 2003 12:50:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from eggert by penguin.cs.ucla.edu with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1AQuzy-0002lB-00; Mon, 01 Dec 2003 12:50:26 -0800 To: "Zack Weinberg" Cc: Ben Elliston , gcc@gcc.gnu.org, binutils@sources.redhat.com, gdb@sources.redhat.com, rms@gnu.org Subject: Re: flag day for Solaris portions of config.{guess,sub} References: <8765hf4c8z.fsf@wasabisystems.com> <87wu9mt79r.fsf@egil.codesourcery.com> <871xrs5b9j.fsf@penguin.cs.ucla.edu> <87znegqb31.fsf@codesourcery.com> From: Paul Eggert Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 21:29:00 -0000 In-Reply-To: <87znegqb31.fsf@codesourcery.com> Message-ID: <87brqsw9d9.fsf@penguin.cs.ucla.edu> User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-SW-Source: 2003-12/txt/msg00103.txt.bz2 "Zack Weinberg" writes: > Once a pattern of canonical names has been chosen for a given family > of operating systems, that pattern must not ever change. That's still too strong. Changing canonical names is not something one wants to do lightly of course, but it's not unprecedented. We have changed the output of config.guess in the past, notably for GNU/Linux. That being said, I'm sympathetic to the design principle you're advocating. Ironically, this whole problem occurred because we didn't follow that principle: we changed the pattern of canonical names for part of the SunOS family of operating systems from -sunos* to -solaris*. My most recent proposal switches back to -sunos* uniformly, thus adhering to your design principle even more strongly than the current config.guess does. > Do otherwise and you ruin the utility of canonical system names No, the utility is still there. config.guess is a registry for canonical system names, much as ISO 639 is a registry for 2-letter language codes and ISO 3166 is a registry for 2-letter country codes, All other things being equal we shouldn't change names in a registry. But those registries occasionally change too (e.g., ISO 639 changed Hebrew from "iw" to "he", and this year ISO 3166 changed Serbia & Montenegro from "yu" to "cs"). This is a pain for such widely-used standards, but sometimes the advantages of the change outweigh the disadvantages. Similarly for config.guess.