My intention was never to force every project to support both. You are free to only suport -mingw* for emacs if you want. I would submit patches to projects to have them support both, but those projects are free to reject those patches too. If no project wants to accept those patches, then, yes, my change to GNU config should be reverted.
On the other hand, some other project leaders may agree with me that the burden of adding a second normal form is worth the benefit pf having a more consistent convention for Windows that makes it (a) easy to add more variations if they come up in the future (b) easy to not care which variation with a -windows-* wildcard, rather than explicitly listing *mingw* | ??? | …. Having the entries I added is necessary to unblock me and like-minded projects working to support these configs for these purposes.
Two normal forms is not ideal, but its the only way I see that allows us trying to clean up this longstanding technical debt of ad-hoc windows configs without breaking backwards compatibility.
Ultimately this tradeoff is a manner of opinion; I don't think there is a clear-cut policy that my accepted changes should be reverted. I would appreciate you, Po Lu, not implying my changes are an obvious affront, and instead we can weigh all sides.
> Quoting Zack Weinberg (2023-08-18 04:42:32)
>> On Thu, Aug 17, 2023, at 8:34 PM, Po Lu wrote:
>> > ... such blunders should be ignored, or at least normalized...
>>
>> Even more important than this is the principle that config.sub canonical names
>> are *never* changed, even if they are wrong according to some external
>> standard.
>
> The stability of the set of accepted triples is precious to me as well.
>
> However the patch in question [1] was applied [2] less than seven days after it
> was submitted. It is a bit unfair to quash Po Lu's concerns simply because he
> happened to be on vacation that particular week.
I believe Zack was speaking in favor of canonicalizing the -windows-*
names. But if he wasn't, then consider that the recently introduced
``triplets'' actually duplicate existing ones -- and by doing so,
constitute a change to the canonicalized names produced by config.sub.
So now Emacs will need to accept:
# MinGW64
x86_64-*-* )
case "${canonical}" in
*-mingw* )
*-windows-gnu )
in addition to just *-mingw*. Analogous modifications to configure must
even be retroactively effected on previous releases of Emacs, since we
recommend that config.sub and config.guess always be updated to their
latest versions.