Re: flag day for Solaris portions of config.{guess,sub}

["Zack Weinberg" <zack at codesourcery dot com>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU> writes:

> "Zack Weinberg" <zack@codesourcery.com> writes:
>
>> THE OUTPUT OF CONFIG.GUESS MUST NOT EVER CHANGE.
>> EVEN IF IT IS WRONG.
>
> It isn't reasonable to insist on this as an absolute policy.  If this
> policy were strictly adhered to, most of the changes to config.guess
> would be disallowed, as config.guess typically outputs something wrong
> on unusual hosts.

Possibly I should have phrased it differently.  Referring only to
config.guess gives a misleading impression.  This isn't about bugs in
config.guess/config.sub (which I limit to "conflates two different
systems" and "prints something that doesn't have the form of a
canonical system name").  This is about canonical system names, which
must be stable even if the stable name isn't ideal.

Once a canonical name has been chosen for a given operating system,
that canonical name must not ever change.

Once a pattern of canonical names has been chosen for a given family
of operating systems, that pattern must not ever change.

Do otherwise and you ruin the utility of canonical system names; we
might as well all hand-parse uname -a output.

zw