https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=274246
Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |[email protected] --- Comment #3 from Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> --- I disagree with Wolfram's proposal in more than one way. Naming of such options is inconstistent even when considerung a very narrow range of programs only, see https://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/man.options.1.html: -v is used by groff, but FreeBSD and mandoc catman, traditional makewhatis, man-db apropos and whatis, and NetBSD makemandb use it for conflicting purposes. -V is used by man-db, but groff uses it for conflicting purposes. mandoc actually supported -V for compatibility with groff, but the option was deleted without replacement on 2015-02-16. Let me quote the commit message: Delete the -V option. It serves no purpose but keeps confusing people. Keeping track of the versions of installed software is the job of the package manager, not of the individual binaries. If individual binaries include version numbers, that tends to goad people into writing broken configuration tests that inspect version numbers instead of properly testing for features. To be more specific, when the option still existed, i received many bug reports essentially reading "i run mandoc-1.13.2, i'm doing FOO, i expect BAR to happen, but instead BAZ happens" without saying which version of which operating system people were running, which package manager they were using (if applicable) and which version of the package (if applicable). Obviously, a version number embedded in the binary is almost entirely useless because almost every operating system and package manager patch software they delives in at least some way, and most of these patches are reasonable, so i'm not saying "don't patch": patching sometimes makes sense when you have good reasons. Since the option was deleted, most bug reports include the operating system, operating system version, package manager and the package version displayed by the package manager (if applicable), which makes handling bug reports much easier. FreeBSD is somewhat unusual in so far as (similar to OpenBSD) it does not use a package manager for the base system, but (unlike OpenBSD) appears to be in the habit of putting development versions of software into -stable branches, and not only once, but it appears that the same version of FreeBSD-stable may occasionally update the same program from one development version to the next and to the next and so on in multiple steps. Nota bene, i'm not calling this unreasonable, but merely noticing that it causes a slightly unusual situation for reporting which version a machine is running - but i would be surprised if those reporting problems were hard to overcome. I expext some kind of identifier must exist which version of a given FreeBSD-stable branch a machine is running? Or can users who run FreeBSD-stable really choose and pick as in "I do not want to update my FreeBSD-stable installation as a whole, but i want to update this program to the latest -stable version but leave this other program at what i currently have"? -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
