On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 06:01:24PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 10:42:40AM -0500, Romain Beauxis wrote:
> > Le jeudi 8 juillet 2010 06:44:34, Richard Jones a écrit :
> > > Stdlib could bind the uname(2) syscall, but it's legendary in its
> > > complexity.  Seems more likely to cause problems than just calling out
> > > to the external program.
> > 
> > I fail to see the complexity.. Where is it ?
> 
> Actually *I* misunderstood the link I posted
> (http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man2/uname.2.html#NOTES)
> thinking it meant that the string fields in the structure could have
> variable width.  Reading it again, they don't.
> 
> Nevertheless I still think this is not a useful addition to stdlib,
> but for different reasons:
> 
> (1) You'd have to emulate it on non-Unix platforms, but it's unclear
> what you'd emulate it with.  Windows has a completely different and
> much richer concept of OS version.  This sort of version probing
> complexity doesn't belong in the core library, but in an external "OS
> version" library where detection rules can be frequently updated.
[...]


$ uname -a

If it's not Unix, what will uname(2) or uname(1) give you?

What will be reported on Windows with MinGW or Cygwin?


IMHO using uname(1) is fine.


Ciao,
   Oliver