Re: Why config.guess

[korbb at sourceware dot cygnus dot com]

Hi Robert,

Your last missive was finally persuasive for me:

> Unfortunately, [[...]]  Experience has shown that
> people tend to trust config.guess and not override the result.  So
> right now, most of your installed GNU packages, libraries, and
> so on are probably in /usr/local/i386-mumble.  So if you have,
> say, a binary Perl distribution it's probably installed someplace
> /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/*/i386-solarismumble.  If you change
> config.guess to be smarter for GCC's sake, you've now made the
> installation directory for other packages flail around.

To really work right, the output needs to have the specificity
that the particular package is going to use.  Right.  Sure.
No prob.  It is just a matter of adding options.

It is starting to seem to me that it would make more sense to just
distribute a completely separate application that could handle
everything that every package would ever want to know about a system.
The compute-the-config ap would just create a text database with a
version stamp.  gcc, perl and others would just verify that the
version was recent enough and extract what they needed.

If compute-the-config were missing, then gcc or whatever
would have to drop back to the config.guess approximation
as a part of the "missing" processing.  It would not need
to be "perfect".

Ideally, compute-the-config could be distributed with an OS.  ;-)
In my dreams, I suppose.  :-)