On Wed, Sep 20, 2023, at 6:01 AM, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
The issue with adding new names duplicating already supported ones is that
every piece of software that handles the old name would have to be patched
eventually to handle the new name as well.
Yes, that is true. I have no good answer for that.
Of course config.sub can provide a canonicalization of windows-cygnus into
cygwin if it helps.
I was worried that would close off the possibility of adding them as normal forms later, but maybe it's better to just do it, if otherwise we wouldn't support it at all.
For what it's worth, we could imagine someday something like --std=2024 to have versioned normalizations, allowing packages to opt into doing the opposite normalizations (cygwin -> windows-cygnus rather than vice versa). That would keep my dream of unifying with LLVM alive without impacting any programs which didn't pas the flag. If that is a possibility, then I need not fear adding the windows-cygnus -> cygwin normalization now.