On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 03:21:01PM -0700, Bert JW Regeer wrote: >Even if BSD has no tradition to keep a separate program version, it is >still very handy to be able to give this data to other developers if >something is failing. Programs that don't have a -v or --version switch are >frustrating to people who are trying to find a workaround for a bug that is >in that program, or when looking at documentation online, when the >documentation is for one version and not for a newer version.
This demonstrates the difference between the BSD approach of having a complete, integrated operating system, and the GNU/Linux approach of having a variety of packages, each of different versions, which were riginally intended to supplant the vendor-provided versions of those utilities. A single string like "sdiff (GNU diffutils) 2.8.7" can only report that the sdiff you are using is part of GNU diffutils version 2.8.7. It is not particularly useful for reporting a failure because that failure is equally likely to be in (eg) glibc (the version of which is not reported). For a FreeBSD tool, the closest thing to a simple version number would be __FreeBSD_version. >Dropping -v would be a bad thing, and make the tools not compatible, thus >breaking many scripts that do expect a -v. The only sensible reason for a script to invoke a tool with '-v' would be to try and determine whether that tool has some feature/defect that the script needs to know about. In this case, the reported version number needs to be both in a format that the script can parse and have values that the script recognizes. If a script expects to see: >> $ sdiff -v >> sdiff (GNU diffutils) 2.8.7 >> Written by Thomas Lord. >> >> Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc. >> This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO >> warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Then it is likely to choke on (eg) $ sdiff -v sdiff (FreeBSD) 700055 -- Peter Jeremy Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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