config.guess (was: Re: cvs commit: ports/audio/libmikmod/files patch-config.sub)

[Christian Weisgerber]

Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:

> What is the benefit of a global config.guess?
> 
> My instinct is that a global config.guess would cause problems with
> some ports: I would expect that a lot of ports hack their configure
> scripts in unmentionable ways that make this difficult.  What was
> OpenBSD's experience in this regard?  Do the benefits outweigh the
> pain?

Then it will come as a surprise to you that OpenBSD's experience
has been uniformly positive.  I cannot remember a single instance
where overwriting the included config.guess with the system one
caused any problem.  config.guess only provides the cpu-vendor-os
triplet.  It does not interact with the rest of configure in other
ways.

OpenBSD introduced copying a central config.{guess,sub} template
into CONFIG_GUESS_DIRS when the copies included with most distfiles
failed to properly recognize the then new OpenBSD/powerpc platform.


(If anybody wants to look at this in the OpenBSD repository:
 * The templates are in ports/infrastructure/db/config.{guess,sub}.
 * The make glue is in ports/infrastructure/mk/gnu.port.mk.  The
   variable is actually called MODGNU_CONFIG_GUESS_DIRS.)

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy at mips.inka.de