@werner For what it's worth, I would like to apologize for my rudeness and disrespect. I had a quite convoluted notion of what the development process entailed. In particular, I was ignorant of the different and opposing responsibilities and the separation of concerns involved in the development process. In retrospect, there were at least a dozen different ways in which this could/should have been handled and all of them are downstream.

There was a long drawn out discussion as to the validity of "-hardfloat" in the
triplet name. You can peruse at https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=584052 .

I am not a dev and have pretty much given up. The Gentoo devs are adamant that this
is an upstream problem.

Again, the host is not my invention. I linked it before and I'll do it again:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi.

Gentoo's cross-compile tool, crossdev, suggests using "-hardfloat-" and "-
softfloat-" in the vendor field.

And here is how binutils handles this (they don't shy away from asterisks):
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob;f=bfd/config.bfd

I'm sorry if your understanding of valid hostnames, acceptable by GNU projects, is
two decades old but this project happens to be the only one that assumes there
exists a finite list of valid hostnames without using pattern matching.

Using https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi and a hostname of armv7a-
hardfloat-linux-gnu, with the notable exception of libgpg-error, I have been able
to compile and install all other GNU utilities included the core set of Gentoo
Linux, whether via the package's giving configure script or by use of autoreconf.

Hare are just a few of such GNU packages that I have personally been able to build
and install using the hostname "armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnu":

coreutils-8.25
bash-4.3_p42
diffutils-3.3
findutils-4.6.0
grep-2.25
groff-1.22.3
gzip-1.8
tar-1.29
glibc-2.23
less-483
gawk-4.1.3
which-2.21
nettle-3.2
glibc-2.23
gcc-5.3.0
readline-6.3_p8
nano-2.5.3

The only other GNU package that doesn't compile for me is autogen. But that's due
to a lack of cross-compile support. It otherwise builds just fine natively on
armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnu.

I would appreciate it if you could provide a specific GNU package using autotools
that you assert should fail to support such a hostname, other than this one, so
that I may provide a build log demonstrating that it indeed does.

I would except that config.sub already validates such names as 'armv7a-hardfloat-
linux-gnueabi' so there is nothing to fix. It is libgpg-error that doesn't. If
you feel it should invalidate such names please report that to the GNU config
folks instead. Their repo is at git://git.sv.gnu.org/config.git. Otherwise
pleases fix libgpg-error.

If you decide to change your mind, this patch places the logic in configure.ac.

D370: 845_libgpg-error-link-valid-header.patch

The host naming scheme accepted by this project is really just Debian oriented.
There is nothing saying you have to aid other distro's hostnames but I have yet to
witness a project more unfriendly to non-Debianesque distros that libgpg-error.
You don't have to accept the patch. Understandable, since mkheader would not
ideally be the way to go. But you should at least be open to the idea of
supporting the more liberal host naming schemes that other distros employ.

Whether or not config.sub is up to date should be irrelevant as to whether
libgpg-error should be able to handle CPU variants and the second field of a
HOST. It is supposed to be treated as a freeform field (see
http://airs.com/ian/configure/configure_4.html). As to the precision of the r.e,
it is not supposed to fix or mimic the logic of config.sub. It is to
effectively pigeonhole some HOST strings to a valid header file. Can you give me
a scenario where arm*linux-gnueabi shouldn't map to
lock-obj-pub.arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi.h?

Also, what is the source of your assertion that armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi
is not a valid canonical triplet? Everything that I have ever read about HOST
strings such as "armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi" is that configure scripts treat
them as valid and parse them with case statements (as demonstrated here
http://airs.com/ian/configure/configure_4.html). They don't demand that the
end-user pass a generic version of HOST, like "arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi". The
only reason I chose to patch mkheader.c instead or configure.ac was to build on
the mapping logic already there.

D371: 839_libgpg-error-1.22-fix-mkheader.patch