From: 	Carl Miller <chaz at energoncube[.]net>
To: 	Daniel Qarras <dqarras at yahoo[.]com>, uclibc at uclibc[.]org
Subject: 	Re: [uClibc] Rationale for target naming convention?
Date: 	Mon, 1 Nov 2004 11:00:13 -0800	
> I did not find any rationale for target naming
> convention using for example "arm-linux-uclibc" with
> buildroot when many packages like gdb are trying to
> find something like arm-*-linux? Wouldn't
> "arm-uclibc-linux" have been much better choice?
> 
> Thanks.

The traditional GNU development tools target tuple is

   CPU architecture - hardware platform/vendor - OS

Many times, especially in embedded development, the middle
specifier of the tuple is dropped.  This is because it is
not very often relevant to deciding how to build a compiler,
and most embedded targets are specialized hardware that are
too obscure for the tools to know about.  But if you watch
the configure scripts running, they will always insert a
hardware platform/vendor specifier back in if it is omitted.
E.g., "arm-linux" will become "arm-unknown-linux".

It used to be that for any particular combination of CPU
architecture, hardware vendor or hardware platform, and
operating system, there would only be once choice of C
library.  That is not the case with Linux.  Linux can run
with glibc, uClibc, dietlibc, libc5, or (if you really want
to dig into the dusty archives) libc4.  Thus, for Linux
targets, it's common to extend the target tuple to four
fields:

   CPU architecture - platform/vendor - OS - C library

However, some older versions of tools don't recognize the
fourth field properly, and it's only recently that patches
are becoming common to make the tools respond properly to
C library fields other than "-gnu" (referring to glibc).

Thus, "arm-linux-uclibc" is correct because the C library
must be specified last, in the fourth field, and only three
fields are shown because the hardware platform/vendor is
being omitted as moot.  Recent tools should canonicalize
this properly to "arm-unknown-linux-uclibc".

"arm-uclibc-linux" is not correct because it indicates that
either the name of your target hardware, or the name of the
vendor who designed/manufactured your target hardware is
"uclibc", and since you have not specified a C library in
the fourth field, the default library will be assumed (which
is glibc for Linux).


                         ------Carl


_______________________________________________
uClibc mailing list
uClibc@uclibc.org
http://codepoet.org/mailman/listinfo/uclibc