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From: | Heiner Steven |
Subject: | Re: coreutils version number policy |
Date: | Mon, 18 Jul 2005 22:25:04 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050609 |
Bob Proulx wrote:
Heiner Steven wrote:
[...]
I have two different systems (Debina and SuSE), both with coreutils version 5.2.1 installed. The "uniq" commands on both system print the same version number (5.2.1), but support different command line options. In particular the first system's "uniq" supports the "-W" option, the second system's "uniq" does not.
[...]
I thought that the "coreutils" version number described a set of commands together with their features and bugs, new features causing a new version number.And for the upstream project that is true. Taken in isolation of any changes to the upstream the version number is always modified when new versions are released and so would uniquely describe a full set of features. But distros do often make modifications to upstream sources for their own purposes.
So the maintainers of a distribution should provide ways for users to find out, if they changed a base coreutils utility. Perhaps "$utility --version" could list the patches applied. But I understand that this is specific to a distribution. [...tips on how to check for valid utility options...] Bob, thanks for the fast response. Heiner
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