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

[Roger Leigh]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 10:03:09PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 10/08/2012 09:27 PM, 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 outdated config.guess and config.sub files (see links below).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 still prefer the idea of being able to set an environment variable,
> $CONFIG_GUESS, rather than going hunting ourselves.  Then, porting to a
> new config.guess script is a matter of calling:
> 
> ./configure CONFIG_GUESS=/path/to/new/version
> 
> rather than hoping that a hard-coded hunt will find the new config.guess
> appropriate for the system wanting the upgrade path.

This does not solve the problem.  You still then have to update
up to 30K packages to run configure with this new argument.  While
using an env var is fine to override the default behaviour, this is
really somewhere where having it behave sensibly by default without
any special action is required.  Is defaulting to checking in
standard places like $datadir/misc so difficult?  Are there any
significant downsides to doing so?  Long-term, having configure
pick up a current config.guess/sub (and libtool) is something of
enormous benefit, because the current approach of embedding them
causes more problems than it solves.


Regards,
Roger

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