uname -a default options

[Mark Johnston]

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