Re: [RFC] getting rid of the config.guess/sub problem when bootstrapping new ports/systems

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, Paul Wise wrote:

> On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 11:07 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
> > Does simple replacement of config.guess and config.sub constitute a
> > useful "port" to this previously unencountered target?
>
> Yes. The problem is that we have to repeat this process for every
> package every time we want to bootstrap a new port or system. Or we can
> change every package to replace config.guess/sub. Or we can change the
> packaging building process for every distribution to replace
> config.guess/sub. Or we can just change autoconf so that it creates
> configure scripts that look for the latest config.guess/sub. I am
> pursuing all of these approaches, starting at autoconf.

While replacing config.guess/sub gets over the first hurdle, there are 
surely additional hurdles to be encountered which might render getting 
past the first hurdle to be moot.  For example, libtool (also embedded 
in packages) includes platform-specific code keyed off of results from 
config.guess.  Many configure scripts include peculiar code keyed off 
of results from config.guess.

There is really no solid solution other than performing proper 
maintenance of the packages and sending patches to the upstream 
maintainer.

For an exceedingly-rare platform like arm64, it is likely that the 
early ports will be of rather low quality and that quality will not 
improve until package maintainers take an interest, get access to 
target hardware, and make sure that their package works well on that 
target.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/