getting the running patch level

[olli hauer]

On 2012-08-22 12:44, Adrian Penisoara wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Roger Marquis <marquis at roble.com> wrote:
>> Jilles Tjoelker wrote:
> [...]
>>
>> WRT writing a new file, something like /etc/bsd-release would be a good
>> choice following the principle of least surprise.  Mergemaster can and
>> should ignore it (and motd, issue, ...).
>>
> 
>   I support the idea of using an /etc/*-release file to tag (and this
> makes me think about /var/db/freebsd-update/tag) the current release
> version details of the system (not only the kernel, but the whole
> installed system). This seems to be a popular choice among Linux
> distributions and thus ISV's should feel comfortable with the
> approach.
> 
>   Mergemaster and/or other updating mechanisms should update the file
> to reflect the reality after upgrades/updates.
> 
>   Now the format of the file would be also debatable: other vendors
> releasing derivative works from the main FreeBSD source tree (like
> FreeNAS, PC-BSD, etc.) will want to leave some marks as well. Should
> we retain only the vendor's release tag or should we have a multiple
> entries (for the original FreeBSD version and the vendor) ? Should we
> even think about multiple ${vendor}-release files or just bsd-release
> ?

In case a new file will be used, I suggest using the cpe framework,
see http://cpe.mitre.org/specification/

Using a standard framework makes it easier to write platform
independent tools for example in visualization environments.

sample /etc/system-release-cpe entry
cpe:/o:freebsd:8.3:ga:x64 ...

--
Regards,
olli