On Sat, 25 Jul 1998, Jonathan Stone wrote:

: One problem with using "mips" for mipseb is, what do we call the
: release(7) directory endian-neutral mips files (manpages, ???)

`mips'.  man(1) can be told to deal with that simply, or appropriate
symlinks can be added (what do we do for cross-platform-capable devices,
such as those that sit on PCI busses?).

: Why do there need to be two values for ${MACHINE_ARCH}, though?
: What happens when we go to 64-bit (mips3) instructions?
: Does that mean we have four values?  Is that good engineering?

Yes, that means four values when you go to 64 bits.

MACHINE_ARCH should specify a baseline level of compatibility from the
default output of the toolchain.  If a mipsel64 system can run little-endian
32 bit MIPS binaries, fine, but it's under emulation.

So, if the default compiler output on a mipsel64 system cannot be run on a
32-bit mips box, it should _not_ share the MACHINE_ARCH.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)