On Mon, 2 Nov 2020 10:54:13 +0100
Stephane Ascoet <stephane.ascoet@???> wrote:

> Hi, If I'm not wrong, updating only the documentation doesn't solve
> the main concern of this bug witch is a brokening-scripts-change in
> "free" output

I think you should report this backward-incompatible change to the
upstream developers, as the devuan version of the free command comes
unmodified from the procps package

https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/master/Documentation/bugs.md

the change was made 6 years ago, in 3 commits, which removed the -o
option and renamed -a to -w, in addition to a different output format

https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/51cd57259aa752fd3b958f61d71e78b4ca7dbef6

as the procps backward-compatibility actually is not guaranteed, may be
it's better to read directly the /proc/meminfo file, as it would not
change in future releases

ciao!