Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:

> Maybe we should take this chance to finally introduce a queriable
> version number in (b)make and require everyone to update?

To quote David Brownlee:

        A while back I sent this to the list for comment but ...
        Resending in the hope its more interesting for people now :)

I wrote last December:

  Subject: old pkgsrc installation on Linux broken by old bmake and Makefile syntax
  ...
  Anyway, it seems to me that pkgsrc needs a version check for bmake the
  same way it checks for the latest pkg_* tools and for digest.
  
  I could not find a way to ask bmake for its own version, neither with a
  command line switch nor an internal variable.
  We could work around this if the bootstrap process registered bmake as a
  package with a version number but as far as I know this does not happen
  at the moment.
  
  Whether it is easier to add an internal variable (and command line
  option) to bmake or to change the bootstrap process I do not know, 
  but I prefer the first solution. Asking bmake for its version looks
  better to me.

ciao
     Klaus