uname -a default options
Mark Johnston
markj at freebsd.org
Tue Oct 15 16:48:09 UTC 2019
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 12:26:00PM -0400, Mark Johnston wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 05:41:26PM +0200, Gordon Bergling wrote:
> > Hello List,
> >
> > "uname -a" is currently mapping the -a option to „-mnrsv“, which results in something similar like
> >
> > $ uname -a
> > FreeBSD lion.0xfce3.net 12.0-STABLE FreeBSD 12.0-STABLE r350835 GENERIC amd64
> >
> > What would you think about reducing the option mapping for „-a“ to „-vmn“ , which would result in a less repetitive version string like the one below.
> >
> > $ uname -vmn
> > lion.0xfce3.net FreeBSD 12.0-STABLE r350835 GENERIC amd64
> >
> > Adapting this would be trivial, but before I hack something together, I would like to get some feedback if such a change would be welcomed?
>
> I'm not sure about the history which led to the current behaviour of -a,
> but the unfortunately reality is that changes like the one you propose
> will likely break programs that process uname -a output. Of course,
> such programs should likely be using more specialized uname options
> instead, but the current behaviour of -a has been in place for something
> like 25 years, so it's quite likely that something depends on it. In
> these situations I prefer to maintain backwards compatibility.
It seems that the mail I replied to is a duplicate of [1], but it
reappeared in my inbox for some reason. The conclusion there was
basically the same as what I wrote.
[1] https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2019-August/054963.html
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