Re: config.guess Linux overhaul

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Dec  6, 2000, Ben Elliston <address@hidden> wrote:

> Background: on many GNU/Linux systems, config.guess uses the output of `ld
> --help' to determine which architecture, object file format and C library
> version the build system uses.

> Instead, I am seeking to replace this cruft with a cleaner and more portable
> alternative.  After much deliberation, the best I have come up with is to
> use file(1) from GNU fileutils, which is *very* likely to be present on
> every GNU/Linux system.

Not really.  Libtool has gone down that path, and I regret that
immensely.  Every week or so, we get a bogus bug report about `file'
not being present or not printing what we expected it to print,
because of translations, modified magic files, etc.  Please don't
propagate the same mistake to config.guess.

Can't you just rely upon `uname -m' on GNU/Linux, at least for the
architecture.  WRT object file format and C library version, is there
any reason why testing for __ELF__ and __GLIBC__ isn't enough?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  address@hidden, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        address@hidden, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me