Re: [PATCH] config.sub: Accept LLVM-style $cpu-$vendor-windows-cygnus

[Zack Weinberg]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2023, at 9:59 AM, John Ericson wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 20, 2023, at 6:01 AM, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
>> 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.

+1 from me on the general principle that if LLVM accepts a name then
config.sub should know about it, and map it to an existing GNU name that
means the same thing, if any.

> 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

If you want to work on this, I suggest that your first step should be
to try to make config.sub and config.guess as table-driven as possible.
Right now, adding *any* sort of alternative mode for output is going to
be an exercise in frustration, since both scripts are big balls of mud
(in the classic sense of that term -- http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html).
Given the extreme limitations of portable shell scripting, this may only
be possible if you convert them to be generated from a more flexible source.

zw