Subject: Re: The uname response
From: [email-masked] (Christopher G. Faylor)

14 Jan 1999 03:20:42 GMT
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
References: <[email-masked]>
X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test63 (15 March 1998)

In article <[email-masked]>,
Gordon Watts Brown University <[email-masked]> wrote:
>  In B19, `uname` returned "CYGWIN32_NT". It now returns "CYGWIN_NT+4". And
>uname -r returned "4.0" in B19 and now returns a horrendus string with lots
>of spaces in it and other nasty things like that.

Umm.  One space, maybe?

>  First of all, uname shouldn't return a "+4", should it? That "+4" is a
>version number and not a machine name.

Hmm.  when I type 'uname' I get "CYGWIN_NT-4.0".  I don't know why you would
be seeing a '+' and not seeing a 4.0.  Btw, the output of 'uname' is not
the machine name.  It's the name of the operating system.

>But the dropping of the 32. Is the core bit of that string, CYGWIN_NT, going
>to stick with us? There are already lots of packages that use the
>CYGWIN32_NT string to label the software, so changing to CYGWIN_NT is going
>to be a fair amount of work and frustration for people. I don't want to push
>people unless I have to unless this is the last time.

Well, I can't guarantee that this won't change again but I think it is
unlikely.  The name of the product will remain as "Cygwin" for the
foreseeable future.

>  Also, the "+4" causes me problems because the software is structured with
>the idea that the response to "uname" is constant, and the response to
>"uname -r" changes with time as the OS gets better and better. I am, of
>course, looking forward to NT5 here (with real symbolic links! Yes!)...

Again, I have no idea where the +4 is coming from.  I can suggest that
you might want to ignore the extra stuff if it is causing you problems.
Perhaps you hadn't noticed but this field always changed depending on
the OS, depending on whether it was NT or 95.  We've just added specific
version number here since we've added more information to uname -r and
ran out of room in that field.

>  I'm going to try and rebuild cygwin this evening and change the uname --
>I'm not sure how hard that will be (it was easy in the B19 release). I think
>I'll change the uname to return "CYGWIN_NT" or "CYGWIN32_NT" and the -r to
>return "4.20.1".

Isn't free software wonderful?

>  And the problem I'm having with a relative path in my PATH var seems to be
>shared by some and not by others. I've been trying to assemble system
>configurations to see if there is a crucial difference between the two sets
>of systems, but haven't found it yet.

Actually I've located the bug.  It should be fixed in recent snapthots.
-- 
[email-masked]
http://www.cygnus.com/