Small motd nit in 10.1

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday, October 29, 2014 8:47:42 pm Paul Mather wrote:
> 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).

A fact I continue to bemoan. :(

> 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
> =====

The problem, of course, is that if you are obtaining the version for a bug 
report or an e-mail to the lists, the latter output provides more details 
(e.g. architecture as Warren noted) even though it is stale due to 
implementation details of freebsd-update.

-- 
John Baldwin