getting the running patch level

[Adrian Penisoara]

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
?

Thanks for your time,
Adrian Penisoara
EntepriseBSD