On 10/23/26 09:24, Ariel Machado wrote:
Hi all,
I agree with Jacob that config.guess and config.sub are intended to be
drop-in updates, and that adding support for a new platform without
changing a package’s code is a real strength of GNU config.
There is a separate issue, though: downstream packagers need a stable,
identifiable source archive.
A release can provide that without implying a major change or breaking
compatibility: it gives packagers a fixed artifact, an official
download location, and a checksum they can record and verify.
I was specifically stating that the standard major/minor versioning
would be useless because these scripts need to maintain "API v1" forever.
[...]
Publishing official source archives in Savannah’s releases area
(whether as periodic dated snapshots, major.minor releases, or a
latest pointer to an immutable, versioned archive, whichever cadence
the maintainers consider most appropriate) would give downstream
consumers a supported download location and stable,
checksum-verifiable artifacts, while preserving the rolling-release
and drop-in compatibility model Jacob described.
Publishing dated snapshots as "releases" is probably the best solution
here. After all, the config.{guess,sub} scripts themselves carry a
last-change date as "timestamp".
Running `grep ^timestamp config.{guess,sub} | sed -e 's/^.*=//' -e
"s/'//g" -e 's/-//g' | sort -dr | head -1` gives the latest of the two
timestamps as eight digits, suitable for use in a snapshot tarball
name. Catch that in SNAPDATE and `tar -czf config-${SNAPDATE}.tar.gz
config.{guess,sub}` makes a snapshot.
-- Jacob
