17.17 Printing –version and bug-reporting information ¶

Gnulib provides a few modules for printing --version and bug-reporting information according to the GNU Coding Standards; see https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/_002d_002dversion.html#g_t_002d_002dversion

The ‘version-etc’ module defines functions used to emit --version and bug-reporting input in a standard way. The module expects the string version_etc_copyright to be defined to display the copyright holder along with the package release year. The version_etc function can then be used like so:

const char version_etc_copyright[] = "Copyright %s %d copyright-holder";

int
main (void)
{
  version_etc (stdout, "my-program", "my-package", "1.0",
               "author1", "author2", (const char *) NULL);
  return 0;
}

The above example generates the following output:

my-program (my-package) 1.0
Copyright (C) 2025 copyright-holder
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by author1 and author2.

The ‘version-etc’ module also defines the function emit_bug_reporting_address which emits the bug-reporting location based on arguments passed to AC_INIT. For example, using the following in configure.ac:

AC_INIT([gnulib], [0.0], [[email protected]], [gnulib],
        [https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/])

And the following program:

#include <config.h>

#include "version-etc.h"

int
main (void)
{
  emit_bug_reporting_address ();
  return 0;
}

Will output:

Report bugs to: [email protected]
gnulib home page: <https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/>
General help using GNU software: <https://www.gnu.org/gethelp/>

The ‘version-etc-fsf’ module defines and links to the variable version_etc_copyright containing copyright information for Free Software Foundation. This module should be used by programs which are FSF-copyrighted and use the ‘version-etc’ module.

The ‘argp-version-etc’ defines the argp_version_setup function takes the program name and authors as arguments. This function should be called before argp_parse since it modifies argp global variables; see https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Argp-Global-Variables.html.