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

[Paul Wise]

On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 13:52 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

> 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.

Agreed, the key here is to not give up before starting. I'll probably
work on other issues as I find out about them. The copies of libtool
parts are probably the next thing to work on.

> 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.

In that case I should revise my patch to always use the latest available
config.guess instead of always trying the one in the package first.
Thanks for the info, I was a bit worried about that issue.

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

That doesn't scale to 30K packages, each with different maintainers both
upstream and Debian. Not to mention all the other distros.

> 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.

The people who are working on arm64 are employees of ARM Ltd and have
many years of experience with ARM stuff in both Debian and upstream. I
trust them to get the port right the first time. As for the packages, I
would guess that the other 64-bit Debian ports (ia64, amd64 etc) we have
had would have fixed most 64-bitness issues years ago. I would hope that
the port will be ready by the time ARMv8 capable SoCs are shipping.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/

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