Re: Outdated GNU config (config.{sub,guess}) and autotools-dev
On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 04:19:10PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
>Hmm. Yes, this is an interesting solution to that part of the question. It
>does mean that debian/rules will need to be structured such that
>$DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE is made available even when not being called from
>dpkg-buildpackage, but this is good practice anyway.
Of course! it was just a sketch.
>
> An interesting suggestion. I'm trying to decide if I like this idea. :) Of
> course, if other options prove impossible due to licensing restrictions, this
> is not the worst alternative to present itself. The limitations I do see are
> that it requires maintainers to patch scripts they may not understand well
> themselves, and that it takes control away from config.sub regarding what
> constitutes a 'canonical' host type.
I think config.sub cannot change its output ever, which must depend only of the
distribution, not of the hardware used for building, so once the correct value
is computed we can add it to values reported by dpkg-architecture safely, since
config.sub cannot be modified to have a different output for this distribution
afterward.
Also we can write a script that check config.sub look like the official one
(easy since it has a strong structure) and then do patching to help
maintainers. Also a good point is that maintainers can choose not to use it if
they know the config.sub is hacked in some ways by upstream. Also
this is a technical issue due to the design of configure scripts that should
not stop us to do the right thing (whatever it is).
Really I dislike use of config.guess when building debian packages, because
it guess the arch you build the package on, not the arch you build the package
to.
Bill
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