Re: Bugs in unexpand(1) version 6.10

[Jim Meyering]

Mike Frysinger <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Friday 06 February 2009 01:13:13 Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Pádraig Brady <address@hidden> 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
>> >> -mike
>> >
>> > 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).
>> >
>> > How about:
>> >
>> > ls (Gentoo coreutils) 6.12
>> > ls (Red Hat coreutils) 6.12
>> > ...
>> >
>> > Or perhaps we could use the wget example on my fedora distro:
>> > GNU Wget 1.10.2 (Red Hat modified)
>>
>> Mike, if you're preparing a patch, please
>> put the distro information inside the parentheses,
>> and after "GNU coreutils", i.e., do something like this:
>>
>>      ls (GNU coreutils, Gentoo p1.0) 6.12
>>
>> Whether it has distro-specific patches doesn't change
>> the fact that it's part of the "GNU coreutils" package,
>> so it should continue to say that.
>
> i was thinking a common change to the version-etc module to add a "packager"
> field rather than having every package out there allow people to tweak
> PACKAGE_NAME.  what do you think of that ?

Sounds sensible.
The question then becomes whether to change version_etc
(probably not), or to add a new interface that takes
the additional parameter.

Does anyone prefer to add a parameter to version_etc?