[CentOS-devel] /etc/redhat-release

Thu Jun 19 21:30:50 UTC 2014
Jimmy Kaplowitz <jkaplowitz at google.com>

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 6:15 AM, Miroslav Suchý <msuchy at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 06/19/2014 12:38 PM, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote:
> > Features that are introduced by systemd can't be assumed as present
> except on those (recent) Linux OS versions which are
> > using systemd, and can almost be assumed absent outside the Linux world
> (such as Solaris, BSD, Win/Mac). A few
>
> Well parsing /etc/redhat-release works only on RHEL/Fedora.
> /etc/os-release is little better, although I admit id did
> not work on Windows :)


Right, I was replying to the /etc/os-release. That only works on
RHEL/CentOS/Fedora 7, 6 and maybe 5. Python's platform module supports far
older versions of those.

> non-systemd Linux distros do ship /etc/os-release, especially those
> distro preparing to adopt systemd like Debian and
> > Ubuntu - but even there only in recent or unreleased versions
>
> Not completely true. It is present in Debian for 2 years - long time
> before considering systemd. And it is present in
> Debian stable already:
>   https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=659853


Debian stable already has pretty good working systemd as a non-default
option, which explains that. The recent publicity was about Debian's
decision to switch the default starting with Debian 8 "jessie".

For enterprise-lifecycle distros like Debian / RHEL / CentOS, being added
two years ago and being present in only the most current stable release
counts as "recent". Many people are still running Debian 7 "squeeze", to
the point where a subset of squeeze ("squeeze-lts") is still receiving
support and security fixes beyond Debian's normal policies.

- Jimmy
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