Re: How to check for a GNU userland

[Michael Goetze]

> > I've never quite understood what the "vendor" is supposed to mean, exactly.
> IIRC, it originally meant to be a unique string to identify a particular
> board-HW. This also manifest inside of config.sub, which uses the term
> "manufacturer" for what you and autoconf calls vendor:
> 
> # The goal of this file is to map all the various variations of a given
> # machine specification into a single specification in the form:
> #       CPU_TYPE-MANUFACTURER-OPERATING_SYSTEM
> # or in some cases, the newer four-part form:
> #       CPU_TYPE-MANUFACTURER-KERNEL-OPERATING_SYSTEM
> 
> Eg. there can be i386-based systems running Linux on non-PC-HW, where
> 'pc' would be wrong.

Well yes, of course it's useful to distinguish between, say, DECStations and
SGIs, both of which use MIPS processors. The question is, what to do with this
field on PC hardware, considering that a Dell PC is uncannily similar to a
Compaq PC...
Anyways, assuming that "Manufacturer" means, well, "Architecture" and not
"Manufacturer", wouldn't the correct spec for a typical Debian machine be
"i686-pc-debian" bzw. "i686-pc-linux-debian"? Because, as we all know, Linux is
not an OS...
This would, of course, mandate the "newer four-part form" for Debian, so as to
distinguish between "i686-pc-linux-debian", "i686-pc-hurd-debian" and
"i686-pc-netbsd-debian", the three-part form of all of which is
"i686-pc-debian". Now, what I'm asking is, can't we do it in a way which would
be more backwards-compatible while still providing more information? E.g.
ARCHITECTURE-OS_VENDOR-KERNEL.
How do the various NetBSD ports do it with different arches on the same
processor?

- Michael

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