whoami.h, standardisation of UNIX version names

[Keld J|rn Simonsen]

I posted this some three weeks ago, when everybody else were in
SLC and the connections between Europe and North America were
not that good. I have seen no responses on it, so here it goes again:

Now I have for God knows which time installed new uucp, news ...
software on our different machines, pdp, vax, m68k's.
And I know this is going to happen many more times in the future...

I have used about a week now, finding small bugs, tailoring the
system, testing, making the same corrections to the source to specify
machine type, OS type, machine name etc. 

I think it would have saved me quite some time if the old (pre
2.9 news) way of doing it via /usr/include/whoami.h definitions
had been used. /use/include/whoami.h is an obvious place to put 
information on the system, including name of organisation, address etc., 
items which are not provided by USG uname(2) and BSD functions, 
but needed e.g. in news.

This of cause requires the installer to be root/bin, but you have to be
privileged anyway to install things like uucp and news, and it is only 
once that the system administrator has to do the <whoami.h> file. 
I do not see that this scheme could give problems to binary distribution
these problems are there allready, and they might be eliminated by 
writing something like the uname.c distributed with news for 
getting long name of the organisation, etc. 

Not to mention, a lot of other software systems may benefit from a
<whoami.h> file too.

A problem is what to be defined, and how. E.g. Unix versions
have quite some names for the same level in different software.
V6 (a nice little system), V7, PWB are well establised. But what about
SIII/S3, SV/S5, SVRII/S5R2, BSD41C/BSD42 etc? And what about
common denominators like USG and BSD ? What is to be considered a 
common denominator, I have seen BSD41C used as indication of 
a 4.2 system, they have the same directory structure !
I think this problem should be addressed even if you do not like the
<whoami.h> solution, it would be nice to have unique names for the
systems. I prefer the S3/S5/S5R2 as shorter and more readable.

I think we should define a minimum set of names in <whoami.h>
and the associated appropiate values. There should be what
uname(2) now gives us, a MYORG, maybe a USG or BSD entry,
and a PROCESSOR and a MACHINE def.

Keld Simonsen, Institute of Datalogy, University of Copenhagen
mcvax!diku!keld