severity 752664 wishlist
tags 752664 wontfix
thanks
On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 07:20:15AM -0500, woodqs wrote:
I have removed the nonstandard GNU extension "-o" and refactored options referring to operating
system implementation so that they no longer make a distinction between "kernel" and
"operating system." POSIX defines uname in a way that does not make this distinction.
POSIX does very little to define uname, but does recommend that it's
basically useless. (Understand that uname is defined in terms of
historical systems and is structured in a way that does not map well to
modern systems--hence SUS's recommendation to simply not rely on it.)
The only value it does have is that, insofar as uname is consistent on a
particular platform, an application can make some limited assumptions
based on the output. In this case, there are additional (basically
useless) options available due to quibbles over the concept of "kernel"
as distinct from "operating system". I'm not inclined to make Debian's
uname differ from that found on other Linux distributions in an effort
to make the vocabulary of its command line options conform to one
interpretation of a particular concept or another--especially since
there's no practical benefit (as far as I can see) to making the change:
no sane application should be using the -o option at all, and the -s/-r
options clearly correspond only to the kernel. (Note that changing -s to
reflect something other than the kernel is a non-starter as it will
break too many existing scripts.)
My own recommendation is that uname be used only as:
1) "uname" or "uname -s", for the very limited purpose of allowing a
script to portably distinguish a Linux-based system of some sort from
some other platform as OpenBSD, etc., to be used as an entry point into
platform-specific code. (The "Linux" branch may well need additional
distribution-specific logic.)
2) "uname -r", to easily see the kernel version if there's some reason
to do so (many such uses historically would be better implemented as
feature tests)
3) "uname -a" to give a user a general idea of what kind of system he's
using.
Once a script has found that it's running on something that's vaguely
"Linux", and pulled out the kernel version, there are more appropriate,
accurate, and reliable mechanisms for determining anything else that
uname might possibly tell it.
Mike Stone
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