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Showing posts from May, 2014

illumos, identification, and versions

Recently, there has been a bit of a debate on the illumos mailing lists, beginning I suppose with an initial proposal I made concerning the output from the uname (1) command on illumos, which today, when presented with "-s -r" as options, emits "SunOS 5.11". A lot of the debate centers on various ways that software can or cannot identify the platform it is running on, and use that information to make programmatic decisions about how to operate. Most often these are decisions made at compile time, by tools such as autoconf and automake . Clearly, it would be better for software not to rely on uname for programmatic uses, and detractors of my original proposal are correct that even in the Linux community, the value from uname cannot be relied upon for such use.  There are indeed better mechanisms to use, such as sysconf (3c), or the ZFS feature flags, to determine individual capabilities.  Indeed, the GNU autotools contains many individual tests for such thin