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

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

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     Paul Eggert already presented evidence that roughly 10% of a sample of
>     configure.in scripts not only look at the configuration name, but
>     match it against patterns containing the string "solaris" or "sunos".
>     To my mind that is enough to rule out the proposed change as too costly.
>
> I'm surprised it is so many.  As someone pointed out, the real extent of
> the problem depends on how many of them check the version number as well
> as the name.  It should be pretty easy to measure that too.

Haven't we wasted enough time arguing about this proposal?  The gain
is trivial - a tiny inconsistency removed - how can it possibly be
worth the effort even of measuring the exact scope of the disruption
it will cause?

>     And, for the third time, Autoconf is not the only user of
>     config.guess/config.sub.
>
> The point is that most programs nowadays use Autoconf, so other uses are
> few.

That turns out not to be the case.  cfengine is a good example of a
program in an entirely different problem domain that uses canonical
system names.

zw