Re: OS detection wrong on Alpine Linux 3.10
On Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 04:10:24AM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote: > > 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. Not really. It is not difficult for programmers to be disciplined and know then they are breaking an interface. Why did they do this? > What do you hope to achieve by refusing to fix this in config.guess? My aim is to keep config.guess maintainable. Is it really the job of config.guess to patch up everyone else's mistakes? Ben
Re: OS detection wrong on Alpine Linux 3.10
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
Re: OS detection wrong on Alpine Linux 3.10
On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 03:30:54PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote: > The value of $host_os, determined by the current config.guess, is: > - On Alpine Linux 3.9: linux-musl > - On Alpine Linux 3.10: linux-gnu > - On Alpine Linux 3.12: linux-musl > > The reason is that config.guess tests 'ldd --version'. However, in > Alpine Linux 3.10, /usr/bin/ldd has been replaced with a shell script > that does not understand the --version option: Does it strike you that perhaps this could be fixed more quickly in Alpine ldd instead? The problem affects Alpine Linux 3.10, but not later versions, it seems, 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. The command line interface of system programs should remain stable. Cheers, Ben
