Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 07:17:10 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Robert Hoehne <robert DOT hoehne AT mathematik DOT tu-chemnitz DOT de>
cc: DJGPP workers <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: Canonical systemname for DJGPP
In-Reply-To: <Pine.HPP.3.95q.970715105220.5957G-100000@newton.mathematik.tu-chemnitz.de>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970806071513.4498J-100000@is>
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On Tue, 15 Jul 1997, Robert Hoehne wrote:

> During my port for binutils 2.8.1 I made a patch to
> config.guess which evaluates now when running under
> DJGPP to the canonical name i386-pc-msdosdjgpp.

It is a good idea to have config.guess work for DJGPP also.  However,
please note that if you say `sh ./config i386-pc-msdosSOMETHING'
(where SOMETHING is almost any string), `configure' scripts will work
even without this patch.  For example, the recent DJGPP port of TeX
uses i386-pc-msdos.djgppv2 when it calls `configure'.

> That means, that anyone who will make in the
> future any ports of the GNU packages should use
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I think this is way too much to request, for something that is not
really a necessity.

First, please note that most GNU packages don't even call
`config.guess' since they don't care which platform are they being
configured for.  (They *do* test which headers and library functions
are available, but don't care to know the name of the machine and the
OS.)  The packages known to me that do care about this are Emacs, gcc,
gdb, binutils, and TeX.  Of these, only TeX and (now) Binutils use the
`configure' scripts when they are built for DJGPP.

And second, I think that specifying the configuration name explicitly,
like the TeX port does, should be sufficient in most cases, since
DJGPP ports typically call `configure' from a batch file, and adding
an argument to the line that invokes it is no big deal.  In that case,
the name you use does not have to be too canonical, since `configure'
will be happy with anything that begins with i[3456]86-pc-msdos and
doesn't have dashes or slashes after "msdos" (see the `config.sub'
script).

In sum, I think that iX86-pc-msdos* (where X is a digit and * stands
for anything except a dash or a slash) should be good enough for any
DJGPP port of a GNU package that cares about the platform name.  And
with the patch Robert sent, the platform will now be correctly guessed
if omitted.