On Thu, 23 Jul 1998, Todd Vierling wrote:

: : >MACHINE_ARCH SHOULD SPECIFY A COMPATIBLE SET OF BINARIES, AND IS DOCUMENTED
: : >TO DO SO.  That's a far more long-standing promise than the mips platforms
: : >have even existed.

: : Nobody disagrees that we need to distinguish both MACHINE_ARCH and
: : MACHINE_ARCH_ENDIAN (or whatever it ends up being called).

OK... Either everyone went on vacation, or the only _dissenter_ that I can
see to my proposal to modify the valuse of "mips" for LE and BE machines
that I see thinks the problem has been `solved' and I went away.

I still haven't heard what keeping both little-endian and big-endian
architectures under one MACHINE_ARCH gains the developer and user beyond
slightly simpler organization of include and main tree source files.

I also still haven't heard why using more than one value to identify a
compatible set of binaries is better than using only one, and why breaking
existing promises of compatibility is better than keeping them.

Oh, and can someone run `uname -m' on an ULTRIX, OSF/1, and Digital UNIX box
on a mips processor and verify what it prints?  Also, if anyone can verify
the output of `uname -m' on NeWS stations running NeWS-OS (I believe they
have `uname')?

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)