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

[Mike Frysinger]

On Wednesday 15 May 2013 09:54:08 Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 05/15/2013 05:53 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Monday 08 October 2012 08:46:57 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 outdated config.guess and config.sub files (see links below). We could
> >> patch every single package that contains config.guess and config.sub but
> >> that would be a lot of effort that doesn't scale. We could also patch
> >> our build tools but the problem would still exist for other distros.
> > 
> > yes, Gentoo fixed this for every package in our tree like 9 years ago (we
> > added a common function like 11 years ago that ebuilds could call
> > manually, but we found that didn't scale).  when you run a standard
> > autoconf script, we automatically search for files named "config.sub"
> > and "config.guess" and replace them with the up-to-date host copy.  no
> > checking or anything :).  in hindsight, that seems like a bad idea, but
> > in practice, i think we have yet to find a package that this doesn't
> > actually work.
> 
> Well, I can't imagine a case affecting config.guess, but constructing
> cases affecting config.sub is pretty simple.
> 
> Classical use-case is developing on cross-built packages, which require
> a new host/target-tuple and therefore ship a customized/modified
> config.sub.

i take the stance that if you haven't merged your code into the GNU config 
project, then you deserve to break.  or at least, you're too bleeding edge to 
be merged into mainline Gentoo (which, honestly, is saying something).  i keep 
the snapshots in Gentoo up to date every few months, or someone asks for it 
sooner (as they just got a change merged), so there's very little to no delay 
syncing there.

and counter point: if someone wants to use e.g. Gentoo to develop things 
early, they can also tweak the host system's gnuconfig package and then *all* 
the Gentoo ebuilds now build correctly for your target :).
-mike

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