config.guess manufacturer string?

[Ralf Corsepius]

Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, Stepan Kasal wrote:
>
> Suse patches automake's config.guess to return <arch>-suse-linux,
Really?

This would be a serious bug in their automake, rendering tarballs having 
having been generated on SuSE largely worthless and rendering 
non-SuSE-OS generated tarballs largely worthless on Suse.

> and 
> based on random sampling of src.rpm's, dont seem to be using %configure 
> that much at all, most of what I checked just use ./configure.
I had been told (from suse employees), they had a policy to not use 
%configure for many years and label it "unsupported", because the 
machinery in rpm behind it was simply too broken.

I don't know if this policy still applies.

> Then there's Debian, where the default configure invocation apparently 
> defaults to --build=<arch>-linux.
> 
> So "abusing" the manufacturer part for distro vendor name seems to be 
> not an entirely uncommon thing.
Yes, it's common amongst many rpm based distros.

The Debian thing you mention is equivalent to internally using 
<arch>-[pc|unknown]-linux

Ralf