Re: flag day for Solaris portions of config.{guess,sub}

[Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

Rainer Orth <ro@TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE> writes:

> Sun employees are ... very careful to only talk about `Solaris
> Next', since the real name of the beast is not yet clear.  So we
> cannot change to *-*-solaris10 until the product is released.

That is why my proposal was to switch to -sunos5.10 instead, as that
name is more stable (and has already been decided on within Sun).

One other advantage of fixing the numbering problem between SunOS 5.9
and SunOS 5.10 is that configure scripts tend to be buggy in this
area.  For example, they might use a pattern like *-solaris2.[0-6]* to
match Solaris 2.0, ..., 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, but with the current
config.guess this pattern now unexpectedly matches the output of SunOS
5.10 (which config.guess currently calls "solaris2.10").  Since SunOS
5.10 will require maintainers who care about SunOS version numbers to
review their configure scripts for unexpected pattern matches anyway,
having them convert to -sunos5.10 is no big deal.  It may even
simplify their patterns a bit.

As I understand it, the major suggestions for my latest proposal are:

(a) Use -solaris10 rather than -sunos5.10.  I argue against this above,
    basically in agreement with your earlier messages on this subtopic.

(b) Wait until SunOS 5.11, since a few packages already deal with
    prerelease versions of SunOS 5.10.  This argument holds less
    weight than the previous backward-compatibility arguments, since
    such packages are dealing with prerelease software and have to be
    prepared to change anyway.  I also argued against this above
    (in the "One other advantage" paragraph).

(c) Don't make the change at all; just keep the incorrect numbering
    indefinitely.

Obviously (c) is something I'm against fairly strongly, or I wouldn't
have brought up this issue in the first place.  I'm quite aware of the
entrenched software that depends on the wrong version numbers, but I
also feel strongly that we should give operating systems proper names
and numbers.  This should have been fixed years ago, but better late
than never.

For (a) and (b), I still prefer my most recent proposed patch, but if
Ben prefers a different option I can code it up.  Ben, what's your
pleasure?