Cygwin version 1.3.2

[Kern Sibbald <kern at sibbald dot com>]

Hello,

Request for change:

The uname program that is loaded by setup along with the
latest release of cygwin prints output in a format that
seems to me not to be totally compatible with other Unix systems.

The uname -a output on my Win98 system gives the following:

  CYGWIN_98-4.10 MINIMATOU 1.3.2(0.39/3/2) 2001-05-20 23:28 i586
unknown

A typical Solaris output is:

 SunOS BigMachine 5.8 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise

A typical Linux output is:

  Linux polymatou.sibbald.com 2.4.5-ac12 #9 Sat Jun 16 00:21:53 CEST
2001 i686 unknown

A FreeBSD output is:

  FreeBSD router.xxxxx.uk 4.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #0: Tue
Jul 24 12:44:29 BST 2001                          
root@router.xxxx.uk:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/ROUTER  i386

Your output differs in two important ways:

  1. The first field which contains the OS name has additional
information
     (i.e. _98-4.10). This complicates looking for CYGWIN compared
     to the simplicity of the other systems.

  2. The third field which contains the OS version has additional
information
     (i.e. (0.39/3/2)). This also complicates looking for and using
the OS
     version. In my case, this version is passed to Makefiles on the
command
     line. As you can imagine, the parenthesis create problems.

Please consider changing the Cygwin uname to conform more closely to 
Unix "standards" by eliminating the additional information you place
on
the first and third fields.

I am not on your mailing list, so if you wish to respond to
me, please do so directly.

Best regards,

Kern

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