Re: unintended usage of gcc-2.96

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On 14 Oct 2000, Geoff Keating wrote:

> According to the GNU coding standards, the --version output should
> look something like
> 
> GCC 2.97 20001008 (experimental)
> Copyright (C) 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> GCC comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  You may
> redistribute copies of GCC under the terms of the GNU General Public
> License.

g77 already produces something like that:

	GNU Fortran 0.5.26 20001014 (experimental)
	Copyright (C) 1997 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
	For more version information on components of the GNU Fortran
	compilation system, especially useful when reporting bugs,
	type the command `g77 --verbose'.

	GNU Fortran comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
	You may redistribute copies of GNU Fortran
	under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
	For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING
	or type the command `info -f g77 Copying'.

[ Should that 1997 date be updated? ]

However, the GNU coding standards for such a case (multiple version
numbers) would have it start more like

	g77 (GCC 2.97) 0.5.26 20001014 (experimental)

For completeness: other programs in GCC that output more than just "2.97":

c++filt:
	GNU /opt/gcc/snapshot/bin/c++filt (C++ demangler), version 2.97

(the program name ought to be a constant string rather than from argv[0].)

gccbug:
	3.113

gcjh:
	gcjh (2.97 20001014 (experimental))

	Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
	This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
	warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

gcov:
	gcov [-b] [-v] [-n] [-l] [-f] [-o OBJDIR] file

(same as gcov --help, clearly should be better.  Perhaps someone can
convert gcov to use getopt_long rather than its own option parser; it
doesn't do anything complicated that would prevent this.  gcov also has
its own version number (1.5) shown by gcov -v.)

jcf-dump:
	jcf-dump (2.97 20001014 (experimental))

	Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
	This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
	warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

jv-scan:
	jv-scan (2.97 20001014 (experimental))

	Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
	This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
	warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

(GNU coding standards say last copyright year only.)

(Incidentally, is the Java compiler - incuding installed add-on programs
such as jcf-dump and jv-scan - going to get some sort of manual included
in the distribution before GCC 3.0?)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk