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

Paul Eggert eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU
Mon Dec 1 20:50:00 GMT 2003 
"Zack Weinberg" <zack@codesourcery.com> writes:

> Once a pattern of canonical names has been chosen for a given family
> of operating systems, that pattern must not ever change.

That's still too strong.  Changing canonical names is not something
one wants to do lightly of course, but it's not unprecedented.  We
have changed the output of config.guess in the past, notably for
GNU/Linux.

That being said, I'm sympathetic to the design principle you're
advocating.  Ironically, this whole problem occurred because we didn't
follow that principle: we changed the pattern of canonical names for
part of the SunOS family of operating systems from -sunos* to
-solaris*.  My most recent proposal switches back to -sunos*
uniformly, thus adhering to your design principle even more strongly
than the current config.guess does.


> Do otherwise and you ruin the utility of canonical system names

No, the utility is still there.  config.guess is a registry for
canonical system names, much as ISO 639 is a registry for 2-letter
language codes and ISO 3166 is a registry for 2-letter country codes,
All other things being equal we shouldn't change names in a registry.
But those registries occasionally change too (e.g., ISO 639 changed
Hebrew from "iw" to "he", and this year ISO 3166 changed Serbia &
Montenegro from "yu" to "cs").  This is a pain for such widely-used
standards, but sometimes the advantages of the change outweigh the
disadvantages.  Similarly for config.guess.
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