-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At some point hitherto, mike ledoux hath spake thusly: > > I disagree. The solution is to provide a package specific to each > > distribution. Of course, your system admin has to pay attention... > > It would need to be named differently on each release so that it could > > not be inadvertently upgraded... > > I disagree. The solution is to fix uname to output the information it > claims to provide with the -s and -r switches: the operating system name > and release. On a Red Hat 7.3 system, that should be "Red Hat Linux" > and "7.3", *not* "Linux" and "2.4.18-5smp".
I disagree. :) The OS is the kernel. This isn't really any different from the commercial world -- when the kernel is updated, often the output of uname -r and uname -v changes. It's a less obvious thing, because we're accustomed to the name of the kernel being the same as the overall product, and rarely care what the release and version are. In general in the commercial world, they don't care often enough for it to matter. And we don't have 30 different vendors shipping systems based on the Solaris kernel... > > Most distributions already do provide such a package. Of course, the > > sysadmin can always remove it... =8^) > > The distribution might provide such a package, but you need to already > know which distribution you're running on to know where to look for it, > since it isn't the same from one distro to another. This is irrelevant. My point was that the distributions can customize the new fields of the uname command based on what distribution-specific package was installed. This at least will provide a uniform interface for determining what the base installed distribution is. The alternative is to hard-code the value, and as has already been established, it would be very easy to install the wrong sh-utils package for your distribution. It's true that the distribution-specific package *could* also be wrong, but there's never any reason for it to be updated, except for the case of upgrading the entire distribution. It's unfortunate that the term operating system has come to be used to mean "the operating system, and all the application software our vendor has decided to ship with it" out of laziness. This has caused a number of problems. This is one of them. Another is Microsoft saying that there's no limit to the software that they can/should be able to make part of the operating system. Another is rms and GNU/Linux. We should prefer a different term to refer to the software distributed with an operating system. Maybe something like "operating environment" (actually I think I've seen this used before). But I suppose it doesn't matter, since it's unlikely to catch on amongst the masses who are asses, as we have already seen with attempts to distinguish things like kilobytes from 1000 bytes, or "hacker" from "cracker," or any number of other things. - -- Derek Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] - --------------------------------------------- I prefer mail encrypted with PGP/GPG! GnuPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D Retrieve my public key at http://pgp.mit.edu Learn more about it at http://www.gnupg.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9YTJYdjdlQoHP510RAtPeAJ9j99zP09i96zIjVjyKXWyaqbuREwCbBoG5 chSTFoGpUcVwtd6VEQrbc3w= =Q5Ri -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
