Re: 1.8 and mkdir_p

[Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen at simple dot dallas dot tx dot us>]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Scott James Remnant wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 21:25, Harlan Stenn wrote:
>
> > I think you are missing my point.
> >
> > The information I am talking about is used for *runtime* decisions - very
> > likely in a script that is in a shared directory used by many different
> > architectures.
> >
> Oh, well, config.guess isn't designed for that -- it's for compile time
> decisions.

Config.guess is maintained separately from Automake.  It is only
distributed by Automake.  While it could be viewed as a build tool, it
is really a useful utility in its own right and should be treated as
such.

Regardless of its author's original intentions, I have been known to
use config.guess in login scripts, DejaGnu scripts, or for other
non-autoconf situations.

One handy use when building for multiple architectures is to use
config.guess to supply part of the build directory name so that it is
very easy to manage heterogeneous builds within one file system.

I agree with Harlan that config.guess should produce similar results
for Linux as for other operating systems, but apparently the Linux
folks disagree since they have intentionally avoided discriminating
between Linux distributions.  Even Linux 'uname -a' is useless to
determine the Linux distribution name.

It is way to late to even think about changing things now.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen