On 10/23/2013 11:09 PM, Brent Baude wrote:
In an ideal situation, libtool would release a new version with the ppc64le content (which is already upstream with them) and ALL upstream maintainers would immediately add the new content and drop new releases. That's ideal but not realistic.
What we can do is to change the embedded copies of autotools code to check hard-coded system paths for newer versions and use them instead of the copies in the source tree. autoconf is based on the notion of an alien or downright hostile environment, and that just doesn't match reality anymore.
For config.guess and config.sub, this change is actually pretty easy, except for deciding on the paths (see the discussion on fedora-devel). The additional cost of extracting the versions and comparing them won't matter at all because they are run only few times during a build. For libtool, I'm not sure about that. I think we need to put the logic for that into the configure script, so that it's not executed every time gcc is run to compile a file.
Obviously, all this won't help you at all with ppc64le bootstrapping, but with a bit of luck, the changes will be in place for ppc128. :)