Well, the script that transforms whatever the user passes with --build or --host is called config.sub. The standard GNU config.sub script translates an OS string of "linux" to "linux-gnu".

I typically build Octave with --build=x86_64-linux, which is canonicalized into a build/host label of "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu".

This is the correct canonical host name and won't be changing unless the relevant upstream projects (autoconf, automake, gnulib, etc) change their naming conventions.

What we might find acceptable, as described on bug #48710, would be to only use the CPU and OS portions of the host label for constructing certain installation paths, so what is now "${prefix}/lib/octave/${version}/oct/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" might become "${prefix}/lib/octave/${version}/oct/x86_64-linux-gnu".

I still don't see clearly enough what the problem reported here is, so I don't know if this would solve the problem or make it worse or what, but that's the issue discussed in open bug #48710.

Can you please describe what is the concrete problem with the use of the canonical host triplet with "-gnu" suffix? I've read the linked message and I can't see where the specific problem is described. Is it because Octave installs files into directories that contain the canonical host triplet? Something else?

Changing what the definition of the variable canonical_host_type is will surely cause other breakage, so that simple change is not acceptable, but something like what is briefly proposed in bug #48710 would be worth looking into.

Hi,

This problem is a little tricky, I'm not sure I understand it fully. However, the requested change is hopefully sane enough anyway.

We have a package for Octave in pkgsrc, and it seems that our build tools expect a pre-defined MACHINE_GNU_PLATFORM to be used in various places.
This is passed value via --build normally, and is defined in configure as $host_alias.

The guess used by Octave differs from what we use, and it caused a very tricky build failure.

for linux, we seem to use x86_64-unknown-linux whereas octave's build guessed x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.

See the original discussion here:
https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2014/03/26/msg019464.html

I'm not sure what value $host has normally.

Thanks.