more complete version info

[JeffBezanson]

As @vtjnash suggests:

Something like ver(), that provides more complete information, would probably be nice to add. I currently can think of the following to include:

• Base.libblas_name
• Base.VERSION
• uname -mprsv
• uv_cpu()

[staticfloat]

Is there any use in providing not only Base.libblas_name but also a version string for the blas library?

[ViralBShah]

What would be great is if every library or module can register a version number, so that versions can be managed in a uniform way.

[StefanKarpinski]

This seems like it should be integrated into require functionality, since that keeps track of what has and hasn't been loaded it should also keep track of what version was loaded.

[staticfloat]

Now that packages have taken the Julia ecosystem by storm, let's revisit this and possibly scope it down a little.

I suggest setting this pull request to track the creation of a ver() or version() call that returns information about Julia itself, and any libraries included. Packages can be handled with separately, this should specifically address @timholy's comment for a way to identify a particular Julia "release".

To that end, the list that Jeff started with seems pretty good, with Julia's commit hash, BLAS name/version, cpu and platform identifies. I can't think of anything else that might be interesting, can anyone else?

[vtjnash]

also potentially useful (in verbose mode):

• list of all modules loaded by
• memory info
• http://nodejs.org/api/os.html
• some environment variables (grep *PATH* and *FLAGS*)