Re: flag day for Solaris portions of config.{guess,sub}

[Paul Eggert <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU>]

Rainer Orth <ro@TechFak.Uni-Bielefeld.DE> writes:

> suddenly all packages that could handle all versions of Solaris 2 in
> the same way (matching *-*-solaris2*) have to handle *-*-solaris2*,
> *-*-solaris[789] and *-*-solaris2.1*.

How many programs are actually affected here?

I just checked Emacs, which I thought would care, and it doesn't; it
treats all versions later than Solaris 2.6 with a *-solaris* pattern.
Libtool doesn't seem to care either.  A few programs do care: I just
checked my collection of sources and found GCC, GDB, Kaffe, OpenSSL,
and Tcsh.  But I don't think it's much of a maintenance burden to
update these few examples.  I can propose patches myself for each of
these, if that would help assuage fears about this change.  (If
desirable, these patches could be installed now, before config.guess
changes, since they would work with both the old and the new
config.guess.)


> If one really *must* change something for technical correctness, switch to
> *-*-sunos5*,

Isn't that change even more intrusive?  It would require changing the
handling of Solaris 2.0 through 2.6 as well.

I agree that in retrospect -sunos5* would have been a better name choice.
If the consensus is to switch to -sunos5*, then that's OK with me.
But it'll be less work right now to adopt the solution proposed in
<http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/config/config/NEWS?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup>.


Eric Botcazou <ebotcazou@libertysurf.fr> writes:

> What's the rationale...?

It's to avoid unnecessary minor barriers to the use of GNU software on
Solaris hosts.  config.guess currently uses incorrect version numbers
for Solaris, and this needlessly confuses new and potential users and
installers of GNU software on Solaris.