On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 04:18:51PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 04:48:58PM +0100, Pavel Cahyna wrote: > > > I don't understand this much. On my Debian/Linux system, uname doesn't > > return anything about Debian, only Linux-specific stuff. I'm not aware > > of any sysctl (on Linux) related to debian or other distribution. So why > > should Debian/NetBSD be different from Debian/Linux in this? > > Most software assumes that a given kernel means that there's a given > userland. This is generally only a problem during buildtime, but it > means that we have to be able to distinguish between a GNU userland and > a BSD one. > > What would probably be nice would be a single sysctl in the upstream > NetBSD kernel that allowed an arbitrary string to be inserted somewhere > in the bootscripts,
I get the impression that maybe we should push for uname to give system information including the userland on all platforms. As that would make sense in terms of why can't I have a Linux kernel with a BSD userland. What about The HURD as well, surely they have had similar problems. > which would allow unmodified upstream kernels to be > used (which would possibly appeal to people using various branches and > so on). sysctl -w netbsd.vendor=Debian, for example. It would be rather cool if I could reboot my system and simply change kernels for whatever reason. Although that seems a little far fetched. Practically being able to update your kernel straight from NetBSD source would make life easier in the future. Dan
