On Thu, 14 Feb 2002, Jason R Thorpe wrote:

>  > I see. Then "pkgsrc" on current is really messed up:
>  >
>  > root@deduction-> uname -smr
>  > NetBSD 1.5ZA mac68k
>  > root@deduction-> pwd
>  > /s/pkgsrc/www/arena
>  > root@deduction-> make show-var VARNAME=MACHINE_GNU_PLATFORM
>  > m68k--netbsdelf
>
> Why is that really messed up?  m68k--netbsdelf will certainly match
> *-*-netbsd* in a configure script, so there's no problem.

OK, so it's not *badly* messed up, but we're still courting problems.
Some software, someday, might include an autoconf macro, for example,
that snubs NetBSD 1.6's "msgfmt" for some reason or another.

Here's another reason for authors to not bother trying to make their
software portable to all platforms of NetBSD. On NetBSD 1.5.x/i386,
"pkgsrc" drops the "elf":

fredb@tautology-> pwd
/s/pkgsrc/www/arena
fredb@tautology-> uname -msr
NetBSD 1.5.3_ALPHA i386
fredb@tautology-> make show-var VARNAME=MACHINE_GNU_PLATFORM
i386--netbsd

That doesn't jibe with anything else: not bsd.own.mk, and not the
"config.guess" in toolchain (which you submitted to the GNU people).

I understand now why toolchain departs from the GNU cannon, and that
seems reasonable. But shouldn't we be emulating the cannononical
config.guess in "pkgsrc"? To my recollection, the only reason we're
passing `--host="${MACHINE_GNU_PLATFORM}"' in "pkgsrc" in the first
place, was that there was no consistency in the GNU packages
"config.guess"'s.

Frederick