Re: coreutils version number policy

[Brian Dessent]

Heiner Steven wrote:

> I have two different systems (Debina and SuSE), both with
                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I think that's they key right there.  Distros like Debian tend to add
lots of local patches to make things run more smoothly for them.  In the
case of Debian:
<http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/c/coreutils/coreutils_5.2.1-2.diff.gz>. 
As you can see, they change a ton of things.  Debian is probably one of
the farthest from "upstream" distros that exists.

If you just look at the actual GNU coreutils upstream tarball, you
should see a unique set of features per version as you expect.

As to "how to write a script" question, the 'Autoconf' way is to test
for the functionality rather than checking version numbers.  But more
importantly, if you write a script that depends on a certain feature
from a certain release of coreutils, chances are that script will be
highly unportable and will fail to work on many systems.

If you want to write portable scripts you have to stick to a "lowest
common denominator" approach, which you can read more about in the
autoconf book.  If you don't care about portability then you don't have
to bother checking for anything because you will be responsible for
knowing that the tools support whatever feature you want to use.

Brian