Re: Bugs in unexpand(1) version 6.10

[Mike Frysinger]

On Thursday 05 February 2009 20:03:36 Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Tuesday 03 February 2009 03:28:58 Jim Meyering wrote:
> >> Mike Frysinger <address@hidden> wrote:
> >>> On Friday 23 January 2009 09:35:54 Pádraig Brady wrote:
> >>>> What distribution are you using (I'm guessing Fedora 10).
> >>>> Distributions that patch coreutils really should
> >>>> modify the version string accordingly.
> >>>
> >>> if coreutils wants distros to do that, it should really facilitate
> >>> things. the way gcc does it now with gcc-4.3+ is a pretty good
> >>> standard: ./configure ... --with-pkgversion="some vendor/distro string"
> >>> ...
> >>
> >> Good idea.
> >> Patches welcome.
> >
> > do you want the gcc method or a new method ?
> >
> > gcc does:
> >  - running `gcc --version` outputs:
> >     gcc (GCC) 4.3.3
> >  - running `configure --with-pkgversion=PKG` changes it to:
> >     gcc (PKG) 4.3.3
> >
> > so the coreutils analog would be:
> >  - running `ls --version` outputs:
> >     ls (GNU coreutils) 6.12
> >  - running `configure --with-pkgversion=PKG` changes it to:
> >     ls (PKG) 6.12
> >
> > that way we could end up with:
> >     ls (Gentoo p1.0) 6.12
>
> Well I'd be a little worried about putting numbers
> in there in case scripts parsing output from --version got confused
> (like our bootstrap script for example).

it's useful where distros version their own package.  with many packages in 
Gentoo, we have patchsets which have their own version number.  being able to 
know without a doubt what patchset is in use can be valuable.

would scripts really be weirded out ?  i'd imagine they'd simply grab the last 
component when it comes to whitespace rather than anything else ...
ls --version | awk '{print $NF;exit}'

> How about:
>
> ls (Gentoo coreutils) 6.12
> ls (Red Hat coreutils) 6.12
> ...

so you want a "--with-distro=DISTRO" which replaces "GNU" with some other 
random string.  how about taking it a step further and extending the gnulib 
version-etc module ?  if it included a m4 file which adds a "--with-
packager=..." option and the source file printed that out, then all GNU 
projects using version-etc would get this functionality for free.

> Or perhaps we could use the wget example on my fedora distro:
> GNU Wget 1.10.2 (Red Hat modified)

that's just a random patch redhat themselves apply ... i think looking at 
packages that themselves support arbitrary markings is better.
-mike