Re: [RFC] pass #2 at getting rid of the config.guess/sub problem when bootstrapping new ports/systems

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 10/09/2012 05:27 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-10-08 at 20:46 +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
>
> > >So, Debian is in the process of bringing up our upcoming arm64 port.
> > >Unfortunately we are also coming across lots of packages with rather
> > >outdated config.guess and config.sub files (see links below).
> I've taken on board advice received during this thread and elsewhere and
> updated the patch to always use the latest config.guess and config.sub
> files. I've also tested the result on one of the things I'm upstream for
> and it works to my satisfaction. The only downside is that there is a
> code block that occurs twice in each generated configure script, but I'm
> not sure how to avoid that, any pointers? Please see the attached patch.

I don't like this approach, because I think you are missing that 
config.sub and config.guess have only been overwritten as part of 
"autoreconf -f" (and not of "autoreconf"). This allows package upstreams 
to implement customized versions of both of these scripts.

Though such cases are rare to find in mainstream packages, theses case 
are quite common in cases to toolchain/OS implementors and 
cross-compilation scenarios.


FWIW: Apart of this, in comparable situations in the past, on Red Hat 
based distros, IIRC, RedHat had chosen to copy their versions of 
config.guess+config.sub as part of their build-process [1] by
default[2]. This would be comparable to the dh_<something> others 
mentioned before in this thread.

Ralf

[1] This copying operation was part of rpm's %configure.
Meanwhile, Red Hat/Fedora relies on packages to providing suitable 
config.{guess,sub}s themselves, i.e. either "suiteable versions", or 
"autoreconf -f" or patching.

[2] I.e. there were ways to allow packages to use their own
config.{guess,sub}.