Comments wanted on an idea of changing the binutils version handling

[Joe Buck]

> For the main [binutils] branch, every utility responds to --version like this
> 
> objdump (GNU binutils) 2.12.90 20020307 (experimental)
> Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
> the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.

Why are you printing the copyright?  This is inconsistent with other GNU
tools, which just print a short one line string.  Because the string is
one line it's easy to use in shell substitutions.

For example:

gcc_version=`gcc --version`

Which is more useful: setting gcc_version to "3.0.4" (current behavior)
or setting it to "3.0.4 Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation blah blah"