Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Updating config.[guess|sub]

[Tony Theodore]

On 17 August 2011 07:56, Volker Grabsch <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello Tony,
>
> Tony Theodore schrieb:
>> Debian kFreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD require more recent
>> config.[guess|sub] files in a few packages (10 or so last time I
>> checked).
>
> Thanks for always trying out new systems. I think that support
> for those systems in mingw-cross-env would be really great.

It's always very interesting to explore different systems, and it
helps to restore some sanity after struggling with OSX breakages every
compiler/os upgrade :(

Debian/kFreeBSD always reminds me of this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050403015508/http://gentooexperimental.org/nt/

>> 1. autoreconf --force --install. [...]
>>
>> 2. Create patches to update the files. This works well, but the patch
>> files are fairly large since they basically replace the whole file. It
>> also has the nice property that the patch will fail after upstream
>> updates, so can be removed when no longer necessary.
>>
>> 3. Save the files in src (or tools?) and copy them into the build
>> directories as needed. It should be easy enough to make this fail if
>> the target files are newer, so the workaround can be easily removed.
>
> I agree that variant 1 is not the way to go.
>
> Variant 3 might be an option if those files were package independent
> (i.e. identical for each package). However, I don't think this is
> the case here.
>
> So I'm opting for variant 2, and to ping upstream about that issue.
> Offering the patches to them might not make much sense. But a quick
> note in their issue trackers would be very desirable, mentioning
> that Autoconf version x.y works well and solves issues on those
> platforms. The goal is to make them upgrade their Autoconf stuff
> sooner than they would have without our notice. ;-)
>
> And yes, those patches might become big, but I think we can afford
> that, as it is a very simple solution that saves us from other
> trouble.

Agreed, though they are maintained separately from the autotools:

http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/automake/Auxiliary-Programs.html#Auxiliary-Programs

but the patches seem cleaner and are smaller than I first thought.

Cheers,

Tony