upgrade of file(1) to 4.10 (including FreeBSD elf(5) fixes)
Jon Noack
noackjr at alumni.rice.edu
Mon Aug 9 18:50:22 PDT 2004
On 08/09/04 05:02, David O'Brien wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 07:59:14AM -0500, Jon Noack wrote:
>> Here's the output of my patch:
>> http://www.noacks.org/freebsd/output.txt
>
> This output is mostly OK -- but I would drop the __FreeBSD_version. I
> can't see how knowing that helps anyone. If it is insisted on keeping
> it, it should be printed out consistently for *all* __FreeBSD_verions,
> not just some.
My reasoning here was the following:
1) Now that we have a fairly consistent versioning scheme for releases,
we can avoid printing the version string in those cases. This preserves
previous behavior and highlights at a glance what is (or is based on)
"released" code.
2) Anything else is (or is based on) a development branch; I've found it
highly useful on several occasions to know the version string to see if
something was out of sync with the world. For example, some vendors
have binary-only products that stop working in -CURRENT. Checking the
version string and UPDATING is an easy way to see *at a high level* what
the problem may be. This is not likely to be a problem with "released"
code.
Despite that, I will go with the consensus on printing the version
string. I really don't know much about all this (thus, the "high level"
comment) and was merely trying to improve a tool I found useful. If
there's something better, I'm all ears.
Jon
More information about the freebsd-current
mailing list