Userland patch level

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Alfred Perlstein <bright at mu.org> writes:
> 1) Can we add it as a uname option as well?

It was intentionally done as a shell script so it can be run from e.g. a
live CD without having to worry about binary compatibility.

> 2) FreeNAS uses /etc/version as just a file, any point in doing that
> instead?

No, /etc belongs to the user, and we can't trust that's it up to date;
freebsd-update would update it, but make installworld probably wouldn't,
and expecting the user to run mergemaster or etcupdate adds one more
point of failure.

> 3) This article has an example of a script that works on many flavors
> of linux, any way to make it so that it works on FreeBSD as well?
> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6345/how-can-i-get-distribution-name-and-version-number-in-a-simple-shell-script

Same reason as above.  Plus, I'm pretty sure this does not work;
/etc/lsb-release on a RHEL 6 desktop looks like this:

LSB_VERSION=base-4.0-amd64:base-4.0-noarch:core-4.0-amd64:core-4.0-noarch:graphics-4.0-amd64:graphics-4.0-noarch:printing-4.0-amd64:printing-4.0-noarch

which is nothing like what that script expects.

BTW, this grew out of a discussion in the security workgroup at the
DevSummit (cf. https://wiki.freebsd.org/201309DevSummit/Security) during
which we touched upon roughly the same points as you raised.

This was initially meant to be little more than "echo X.Y-RELEASE-pZ"
and to be used only by portaudit / pkg audit / what have you, which is
why it's hidden away in /libexec, but considering how much it's grown
from inception to implementation, it might make more sense to put it in
a more accessible location.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no