Re: OS detection wrong on Alpine Linux 3.10

[Bruno Haible]

Ben Elliston wrote:
> and 3.10 becomes unsupported after May 1
> next year. By the time this fix is propagated into packages that
> include config.guess, I imagine most users will have upgraded to
> >3.10.

I had hoped that the fix would be contained in the GNU grep release
that Jim Meyering is preparing for this week, and in the ca. 100
releases of GNU packages that will come out before May 1, 2021.

The propagation is rapid: One day until config.guess is mirrored in
gnulib. Package maintainers then routinely upgrade it either directly
or via gnulib a couple of days before a release.

> The command line interface of system programs should remain stable.

You are assuming that system programs have a test suite that will
protect them from introducing regressions? I don't think that's realistic.
Even glibc has regressions occasionally.

What do you hope to achieve by refusing to fix this in config.guess?
Do you want to discourage the use of Alpine Linux? Do you want that
gnulib corrects not only the bugs of so many libc versions, but also
the bugs in config.guess?

I added a workaround in Gnulib [1], but it's clearly suboptimal if
Gnulib fiddles with $host and $host_os, which are supposed to be
defined by Autoconf and config.guess. I would sincerely prefer to be
able to revert this workaround.

Bruno

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2020-09/msg00098.html