Subject: Re: bug#21098: uname man page

From: Bernhard Voelker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2015 07:26:22 +0200

On 07/20/2015 09:26 PM, Norbert de Jonge wrote:
> Maybe someone has time and energy to make some minor improvements to
> uname's man page. The problem lies in the vagueness and similarity of
> the options -m, -p and -i, combined with the program's unpredictable
> output.

Thanks for the report.

Additionally to Assaf's answer, I want to mention that the man page
of GNU coreutils utilities is (almost) identically to the --help output
which we want to keep terse.  Actually the former is generated from the
latter.

At the end of the man page, there is the reference to the real
documentation:

  The full documentation for uname is maintained as a Texinfo manual.
  If the info and uname programs are properly installed at your site,
  the command

              info '(coreutils) uname invocation'

  should give you access to the complete manual.

Now let's look at -m, -p, and -i there:

  `-i'
  `--hardware-platform'
       Print the hardware platform name (sometimes called the hardware
       implementation).  Print `unknown' if the kernel does not make this
       information easily available, as is the case with Linux kernels.

  `-m'
  `--machine'
       Print the machine hardware name (sometimes called the hardware
       class or hardware type).

  `-p'
  `--processor'
       Print the processor type (sometimes called the instruction set
       architecture or ISA).  Print `unknown' if the kernel does not make
       this information easily available, as is the case with Linux
       kernels.

Is this sufficient for you?
Otherwise feel free to suggest a better wording - preferably as a git
patch or a regular diff, but we could also wrap it into a proper patch
for you.

Thanks & have a nice day,
Berny