why is it known as unknown

[Erik Trulsson]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 04:33:19PM -0500, M.D. DeWar wrote:
> for curiosity and exciting dinner banter, why is it I see
> programs/application etc referring to FreeBSD as
> i386-unknown-freebsd4.8 system
> or when doing a configure it shows as that ?

The middle part is really supposed to be the type of the system, so if
you were running on an IBM system it ougth to say i386-ibm-freebsd4.8
and if you used a system from Digital it might be alpha-dec-freebsd4.8. 
On PC systems it is often impossible to determine from a program what
kind of system it is, and it really doesn't matter much anyway, so the
middle part is just reported as 'unknown'.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se