Re: config.guess comments from our sysadmins

[Russ Allbery]

Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:

> New platforms are introduced very slowly (and more slowly every year).

This is not my experience.  I have to update config.{sub,guess} for a new
platform at user request at least once a year, whereas changed platform
names have never caused a problem for any of my packages in their entire
history.  (The linux naming nonsense was brief and avoidable.)

Updating config.{sub,guess} without changing anything else in my package
is, in my experience, 100% safe to a first approximation.  The few places
where it might cause problems can be dealt with when they arise, as rare
as they are.

> People who are using a bleeding-edge platform can expect to do extra
> work.  The existing config.guess script is likely to be fine for 99.9%
> of the user base.

When you're doing work within a distribution that tries to support more
than x86 and amd64, you have a tendency to notice the 0.1%.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>