> uname -a so whenever you upgrade the kernel or change CPU all your programs need manual patching? you may answer, "well uname -a was a joke, you would actual

> uname -a so whenever you upgrade the kernel or change CPU all your programs need manual patching? you may answer, "well uname -a was a joke, you would actually check the libc version". this worked alright in a very specific time period with a couple of big vendors with nigh-unmodifiable toolchains with well-defined release versions. it became increasingly awful when people started making their own toolchains with free software and had to patch every single piece of software to properly detect their new libc. sitting through an hour of autoconf sucks, but slogging through ten hours of patching poorly written bespoke configure scripts is a hundred times worse. edit: not to mention cross-compiling where you can't even run uname -a, and which was almost universally broken before autoconf, which, despite being painful, made cross-compiling mostly work everywhere.