> In fact, this behavior comes from a desire to do the right thing > when building and bootstrapping gcc. GCC's bootstrap process expects > that if the build/host system is sparc64-* that the system compiler, > as well as the GCC binary produced by the gcc build itself, will both > produce 64-bit executables by default. If this is not the case, the > GCC bootstrap will flat out fail.
I'm pretty sure that when I bootstrapped gcc 3.3 last year, uname was still returning 'sparc', and everything behaved exactly the way I wanted it to.