Finding canonical names of systems

[Mike Stump]

[ first, this is the wrong list to ask such question, gcc-help is the  
right one ]

On Nov 27, 2006, at 7:25 PM, Ulf Magnusson wrote:
> How are you supposed to find the canonical name of a system (of  
> known type) in CPU-Vendor-OS form in the general case?

In the general case, you ask someone that has such a machine to run  
config.guess, or failing that, you ask someone, or failing that, you  
just invent the obvious string and use it.

Most portable software doesn't much care just what configuration you  
specify, some very non-portable software will fail to function unless  
you provide exactly the right string.  gcc is of the later type, if  
you're interested in building it.

> If you have access to a system of that particular type, you can run  
> config.guess to find out, but you might not have, and that approach  
> won't work for many systems anyway.

That approach always works on all host systems.  :-)  If it didn't,  
that'd be a bug and someone would fix it.

> The canonical name needs to be known e.g. when cross-compiling and  
> building cross-compilers.

Ah, for crosses, you have to know what you want, and what you want is  
what you specify.  If your question is, what do you want, well, you  
want what you want.  Either, it works, or, you've not ported the  
compiler.

For example, you can configure --target=arm, if you want an arm, or -- 
target=m68k if you want an m68k, or sparc, if you want sparc, or ppc  
if you want ppc, or powerpc if you want powerpc, or x86_64, if you  
want x86_64, or arm-elf, if you want arm-elf, or sparc-aout if you  
want that.  The list _is_ endless.  If you interested in a specific  
target, tell us which one and we'll answer the question specifically.

If you want pre-formed ideas for targets that might be useful, you  
can check out:

   http://gcc.gnu.org/install/specific.html
   http://gcc.gnu.org/buildstat.html
   http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/

I was thinking there was one other that tried to be exhaustive, but  
maybe we removed the complete list years ago.

Aside from that, yes, reading though the config type files is yet  
another way.