Small motd nit in 10.1

[Paul Mather]

On Oct 29, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Oct 2014, Walter Hop wrote:
> 
>> I noticed that the motd has been updated, which is great.
>> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/releng/10.1/etc/motd?revision=272461&view=markup
>> 
>> However, the following line could be improved:
>> Show the version of FreeBSD installed:  uname -a
>> 
>> I would recommend changing the line to:
>> Show the version of FreeBSD installed:  freebsd-version
>> 
>> Users often confuse the kernel version (uname -a) with the actual FreeBSD version from the freebsd-version(1) command. Because of this, people needlessly worry whether their system was updated correctly after freebsd-update has run, because they erroneously check this with ?uname -a?. A small motd change will hopefully prevent that.
> 
> Sorry, I don't understand the source of confusion.

The potential confusion arises because freebsd-version agrees with
freebsd-update, but uname doesn't always.  If you track FreeBSD via
freebsd-update, uname only gets bumped when the kernel is updated. If
you want to know which version of FreeBSD you're running, which command
is more accurate: freebsd-version or uname -a?  I would argue the former
(freebsd-version).

If you track FreeBSD via source updates, freebsd-version and uname -a
match each other, so long as you update kernel and world together.

Consider the system below, updated using freebsd-update after the last
advisory causing an update to 10.0-RELEASE:

=====
% freebsd-version 
10.0-RELEASE-p11
% uname -a
FreeBSD chumby.dlib.vt.edu 10.0-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE-p10 #0: Mon Oct 20 12:38:37 UTC 2014     root at amd64-builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
=====

When you run freebsd-update on that system it considers itself currently
as being a 10.0-RELEASE-p11 system when checking for updates.

Cheers,

Paul.