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

[Mike Frysinger]

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 outdated config.guess and config.sub files (see links below).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.

and behold, no one has ever complained about config.sub not recognizing their 
mips or sparc or x86_64 or aarch64 system ever again.

> If anyone knows where config.guess and config.sub are installed on
> common platforms like the various Linux or BSD distributions, please let
> me know those locations. I have only the paths for Debian and Gentoo.

if Gentoo is the only one that uses /usr/share/gnuconfig/ and every one else 
picked /usr/share/misc/, then i'll just move Gentoo.  don't bother listing it 
in your patch.  even then, many of the other paths (like internal 
automake/libtool) will work fine on Gentoo.

we picked .../gnuconfig/ as it installs more than one file and FHS generally 
recommends that packages w/more than one file not go into .../misc/.
-mike

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