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


From: Ralf Corsepius
Subject: Re: [RFC] getting rid of the config.guess/sub problem when bootstrapping new ports/systems
Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 18:26:46 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130402 Thunderbird/17.0.5

On 05/15/2013 06:13 PM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
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outdated config.guess and config.sub files (see links below).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.
Well, config.sub has allways been amongst those files the autotools supposed not to be generated.

That said, if you replace them by brute-force, you are breaking the UI of the autotools - Read: an utterly bad idea. RH/Fedora has done this for a very long time and has given up doing so for several years, and now is relying on packagers explicitly replacing them (autoreconf -f rsp. by patching).

A better approach would be to only replace them, if they you are sure, they are unmodified.

   or at least, you're too bleeding edge to
be merged into mainline Gentoo (which, honestly, is saying something).
<comments non-disclosed/>

Ralf




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