uname output ?

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 12:03:15 EDT
"Bayard R. Coolidge" said:

>>>>You seem to have missed the same point Gerry did:
>
>Yeah, I guess I did, BUT, SuSE has *NOT* issued an 'official'
>RPM to update the related packages, either, so what I gave
>you is what SuSE has out there _right_now_. 

Yeah, I'm aware of that.  The point of this whole useless debate is 
that sh-utils 2.0.12 is out.  Debian is the only distribution which 
has it right now that I know of (and only in Sid AFAIK).

With the new version comes 2 new fields of output for 'uname':
OS type and hardware platform.  Under Debian, OS type is reported as 
GNU/Linux.  The question is, what will this field report under other 
Linux distros.

Obviously, in order to find this out, we need to find other distros 
which have the new version of uname.  Since this new version of uname 
is evidently so new that the GNU project hasn't even updated their 
own web pages for it, I don't expect any other distro to be shipping 
it.

Therefore, the only way to discover what this field reports on other 
distros or versions of UNIX is to get the source for sh-utils and 
compile it on those distros/OSes.

However, even if one did that, there's no guarantee that our 
questions will be answered.  As mwl pointed out, it's very likely 
that this field is a customized field which needs to be customized by 
each distribution/OS maintainer to report whatever they want it to, 
or, it will display a default string for this field.

I'm mildly curious what the default would be.  It could be 'unknown', 
or, the autoconf scripts may be able to detect some default for some 
set of OSes.

The only real way to find out is to compile/install the source on 
something other than Debian, whether it be SuSE, Solaris, or True64, 
etc.
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!