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

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Joe Buck uttered the following:
> On Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 09:53:29AM -0800, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> >
>> > Are you saying that config.guess is widely used outside of configure
>> > scripts?
>> 
>> Yes.
> 
> config.guess is used in a number of places to generate the canonical name
> for the type of system that the user is running on.
> 
> As an example of such use, consider GCC's test_summary script.

Have another random example:

The repository of (compiled) free software I habitually maintain at
every workplace I've ever been in so far has paths for all binaries
which contain the canonical name of the system they run on. Because
these paths are compiled into a number of those binaries, they can't
change safely without fairly large-scale recompilation.

(Thankfully, the filesystem supports symlinks, so I can work around
this: but it'll still be confusing for users who look inside the
appropriate directory and wonder why sparc-sun-solaris2.8 is a symlink
to sparc-sun-sunos5.8... pretty much the same `minor barrier' as was
originally referred to.)

> That said, for many uses of the output of config.guess, a change would not
> cause significant harm.

Agreed.

>                          This is especially true for source distributions
> that contain their own copy of config.guess: the distribution will generally
> be consistent with the copy of config.guess that it contains.

It's not as though this change will be terrifically damaging, as long as
people replacing config.guess check that it still works as expected on
Solaris boxes...

... but that check may be unlikely to happen: it's not as though
config.guess triplets frequently change, or are *expected* to change.

-- 
`I have some desires that would probably consume the entire lifetime
 power output of one G-type star.' --- Mark Atwood