config.guess manufacturer string?

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Jakub,

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 05:39:49PM +0100, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 05:36:32PM +0100, Stepan Kasal wrote:
> > > My reading of http://sourceware.org/autobook/autobook/autobook_17.html is 
> > > that the manufacturer part of the configuration name is the manufacturer  
> > > of the CPU, not "OS vendor" so the former "redhat" was always incorrect.  
> > 
> > Agreed.
> 
> That's nice, except that "pc" or "unknown" are completely useless in the
> triplets, while having redhat there provides very useful information.

if this is your opinion, then you should report that to
config-patches at gnu.org.

As you know, config.guess usually gets copied to the tree by the maintainer
(usually by "automake -a").  Whatever version the maintainer happens
to have, it gets stored to the release tarball.
With that in mind, it seems really ridiculous to maintained a patched
version of config.guess for years.  If you won't succeed convincing
upstream that abusing ("broadening"?) the manufacturer field this way
is a good idea, you should rather return to the upstream version.

Actually, if you care about the host triplet used for rpm builds,
that's something where config.guess is not directly involved.

Most spec files call %configure.  That macro calls configure with
option --build.  With that option given, configure does not call
config.guess.

So it is possible that you would be satisfied if the %configure macro
used
 ./configure  --build=i686-redhat-linux-gnu --host=i686-redhat-linux-gnu

To achive that, it is sufficient to modify the macro %{_host}.
(Macro %{_host_vendor} should probably be modified as well.)

No, I do not see the reason for doing this.  Should all Linux
distributions do the same?

But in any case that would be much less harmful that creating
confusion with unofficial config.guess copies floating around.

Have a nice evening,
	Stepan