>> Except that tells me whether the kernel being booted is recent, not >> whether the bootloader doing the booting is. > No. It is the version in src/sys/sys/param.h. It doesn't have any > relation to the kernel you are running or booting.
Oh, that kernel version! That it is of no use for my purposes. > The point is that it is a non-changing, human readable identifier of > the source tree that hopefully changes often enough to be able to > tell two versions apart. I care about bootloader timestamps when I'm hacking bootloader code and want to be able to tell the difference between still running the previous booter or the one I built just a few minutes ago - even if "the previous booter" is the one I built thirty minutes ago in the same bootloader-hacking run. Being able to tell the 6.0 bootloader from the 5.2 bootloader, while perhaps important, is not what I'm talking about here. I don't do this often, but when I do there's not much substitute. >> However, based on the discussion, it sounds as though this is not an >> issue: [...] > That depends. Some platforms dropped them completely. That sucks. Well, if portmasters don't mind screwing over people trying to actually hack on their ports' code, I guess it's their call. > It is much simpler to consistently drop it. Simpler? Certainly. My point is, it is a regression, a signficant one for me at least. If you don't mind crippling people trying to work on the bootloader, be my guest. (If I had occasion to work on such a bootloader, one of the first things I'd do would be to add something functionally equivalent back, even if just a manually-changed-when-I-care "hi, I'm not the previous version" printf.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B