basedir spec and plugins

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 30 Jun 2009 at 18:11:32 -0300, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Simon McVittie wrote:
> >On Tue, 30 Jun 2009 at 04:08:26 -0300, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> >> We'll need an architecture key, which is composed by the host OS plus
> >> at least the processor main type.
> >
> >Multiarch http://lackof.org/taggart/hacking/multiarch/ addresses this by
> >taking the CPU and OS (or CPU and kernel+OS) from
> > config.guess/config.sub, i.e.
> >
> >`/usr/share/misc/config.guess | cut -d - -f 1,3-`:
> >> 	i386-linux
> >> 	x86-64-linux
> >
> >i386-linux-gnu, x86_64-linux-gnu
> 
> What's the "gnu" part good for? The important thing here is the kernel ABI 
> and the processor. (This is not a discussion of "Linux" vs "GNU/Linux")

Partly knowing it's glibc, and partly the fact that someone has already written
a fairly comprehensive list of architectures for us, meaning that we don't
have to. Things like multiarch and bits of the Debian build system normatively
reference config.{guess,sub} as their source of architecture and OS names
(e.g. `dpkg-architecture` includes things like DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE, which is
exactly the string we want).

Because "someone" is GNU in this case, the usual politics apply and they call
it linux-gnu, but surely 4 characters are a small price to pay for not having
to duplicate the work done in config.{guess,sub}?

    S