On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 04:18:59PM +0200, Denys Vlasenko wrote: > On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 12:56 AM, Rich Felker <[email protected]> wrote: > > See attached. > > What is the point of such a change? > > People (presumably) use uname -o to determine whether > the OS is Linux, or BSD, or other Unix. > > On Fedora, it says "GNU/Linux". I suspect many other distros have the same. > > My guess is, whoever parses "uname -o" has his code prepared > to understand "GNU/Linux". > This may be not the case with bare "Linux"! > > This change can create someone's scripts.
Does anyone use "uname -o"? My understanding is that the entire reason it was added to coreutils (it's nonstandard, BTW) was political: the FSF wanted to change "uname -s" to print "GNU/Linux", either by changing the syscall behavior in the kernel or patching up the results. Of course the kernel folks said no (or it was just assumed that they would), and distros also said no (such a change would be patched out by distros for the exact reason you mentioned -- breaking scripts), so their only option was to add a new useless option to print "GNU/Linux". Please correct me if my understanding of the history is wrong. > There should be a reason why this is useful... There are a number of people who do not want their systems misrepresented as being GNU systems when they're not. Often this is just political, but it may be relevant in some corporate environments that have policies against GNU software being used for (dubious) legal reasons. As for what constitutes a non-GNU Linux system, that may be hard to nail down exactly, but I think that the conditions (1) not using glibc, and (2) using Busybox instead of coreutils, are more than sufficient to be non-GNU. Even if other GNU components are installed, it's clearly not a "GNU OS". Rich _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
