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Date:      Tue, 15 Oct 2019 12:26:00 -0400
From:      Mark Johnston <markj@freebsd.org>
To:        Gordon Bergling <gbergling@gmail.com>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: uname -a default options
Message-ID:  <20191015162600.GE26396@raichu>
In-Reply-To: <F49E4A66-9874-4126-AEEF-5F32FD662668@gmail.com>
References:  <F49E4A66-9874-4126-AEEF-5F32FD662668@gmail.com>

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On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 05:41:26PM +0200, Gordon Bergling wrote:
> Hello List,
> 
> "uname -a" is currently mapping the -a option to „-mnrsv“, which results in something similar like
> 
> $ uname -a
> FreeBSD lion.0xfce3.net 12.0-STABLE FreeBSD 12.0-STABLE r350835 GENERIC  amd64
> 
> What would you think about reducing the option mapping for „-a“ to „-vmn“ , which would result in a less repetitive version string like the one below.
> 
> $ uname -vmn
> lion.0xfce3.net FreeBSD 12.0-STABLE r350835 GENERIC  amd64
> 
> Adapting this would be trivial, but before I hack something together, I would like to get some feedback if such a change would be welcomed?

I'm not sure about the history which led to the current behaviour of -a,
but the unfortunately reality is that changes like the one you propose
will likely break programs that process uname -a output.  Of course,
such programs should likely be using more specialized uname options
instead, but the current behaviour of -a has been in place for something
like 25 years, so it's quite likely that something depends on it.  In
these situations I prefer to maintain backwards compatibility.



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