Christoph Berg <cb@df7cb.de> writes:
> Re: Tom Lane 2014-05-10 <27476.1399729986@sss.pgh.pa.us>
>> Our normal procedure is
>> o update config.guess and config.sub at the start of beta
>> (from http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/config)
> Fwiw, shouldn't that also happen in back branches?
No, we are not in the habit of back-patching such changes, at least
not automatically. I'd be willing to consider it once the new scripts
have survived a beta-testing cycle ... however, a look at our commit
logs shows we have never actually updated config.guess/config.sub in
any back branch.
> Updating config.* there gives you portability to new architectures for
> free - and there should be no risk of breaking anything.
The policy of not back-patching dates back to circa 2000, when new
config scripts *routinely* broke things due to changes in what they
printed on some machines (again, there's lots of evidence on this point
in our commit history). Perhaps that's less of a concern nowadays.
Still, there seems to be zero field demand for doing this.
As for "new architectures for free", nope --- spinlock assembly code
is usually the gating factor for that, not the config scripts.
regards, tom lane