Hi Uwe. I see the advantages of your proposal but, as suggested in this thread and as you did, sed(1) can be very helpful in this matter. Just my opinion, but one of the best features in the BSD family of operating systems is that these operating systems are simple. The BSD operating systems do not have the overfeaturism we can find in other OSes these days (sadly, Linux and Windows are not the only examples right now).
In my humble opinion, it is better translating the output of uname(1) to the format required by cvs by means of sed(1). What if developers choose to tag the branches in a different way? A small sed(1) expression to translate lowercase letters to uppercase letters and adding the required underlines is probably easier to read for someone with certain Unix knowledge than a non-standard option added to uname(1). And yes... I am against the "-z" and "-Z" options in tar(1), and the "-t" option in spell(1). The latter is even worse. These options can not only be replaced with a pipe to, we say, the compression tools (in the case of gzip(1) we have even more options available in this way) but the filter to remove TeX commands from the source in spell(1) is not in the base system (and should not be... except if TeX is part of the base system, and detex/delatex are not a part of any LaTeX distribution I am aware of, it must be downloaded from a CTAN). One of the goals of Unix (not only BSDs) was splitting complex tasks in smaller tasks that can be efficiently done by the operating system. Small tasks can be accomplished easily by these commands, larger ones (like the one you describe) can be accomplished by a subset of the commands, usually in one of the powerful scripting languages provided with the operating system. Overfeaturism addes superfluous complexity to the operating system. Just my opinion, Igor.
