On behalf of aarch64 porters

Public service announcement

When porting GNU/Linux applications to a new architecture, such as 64-Bit ARM, one gets familiar with the following error message:

checking build system type... x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
checking host system type... Invalid configuration `aarch64-oe-linux': machine `aarch64-oe' not recognized
configure: error: /bin/sh config.sub aarch64-oe-linux failed

This in itself is trivial to fix - run autoreconf or just copy in new versions of config.sub and config.guess. However, when bootstrapping a distribution of 12000+ packages, this becomes quickly tiresome. Thus we have a small request:

If you are an upstream of a software that uses autoconf - Please run autoreconf against autotools-dev 20120210.1 or later, and make a release of your software.

Aarch64 porters will be grateful as updated software trickles down to distributions.

This was the most discussed point during my FOSDEM talk "Porting applications to 64-Bit ARM".