config.guess manufacturer string?

[Panu Matilainen]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, Stepan Kasal wrote:

> 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?

Just for some data points... from what I could find it seems that 
everybody is doing something slightly different here. Mind you I didn't 
actually try out these things, this just based on findings of build logs 
on the net and looking at a few sources from distros so take it with a 
grain of salt and feel free to correct me if mistaken:

Mandriva changes %configure to just pass --build=%{_target_platform}, 
where the target platform is set as <arch>-mandriva-linux.

Suse patches automake's config.guess to return <arch>-suse-linux, and 
based on random sampling of src.rpm's, dont seem to be using %configure 
that much at all, most of what I checked just use ./configure.

Then there's Debian, where the default configure invocation apparently 
defaults to --build=<arch>-linux.

So "abusing" the manufacturer part for distro vendor name seems to be not 
an entirely uncommon thing.

 	- Panu -