[CentOS-devel] enhancing /etc/*-release

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
> On 01/04/15 00:39, Fred Smith wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 10:33:37PM +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>>> On 03/31/2015 10:00 PM, Howard Johnson wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 31/03/2015 21:53, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>>>>> what tools are these / can we reach out and help them get the right
>>>>> content ? this solves the problem of establishing an upstream, giving
>>>>> people who only need a lose knit baseline match and also giving people
>>>>> the centos-7 release stream that we've been building up. At the time
>>>>> of 7 1406 release, this was flagged up as the biggest issue that we
>>>>> need to fix from the distro side of things.
>>>>
>>>> Hmm, ok.  Can we put that data somewhere else instead (an
>>>> /etc/redhat-upstream-release file or something) and revert the
>>>> redhat-release change?  We can't expect everyone to run around updating
>>>> their system management tools for a change in a minor point release :(
>>
>> another less-than-optimal solution would be for app developers to
>> start using lsb_release to find out what distro and release they
>> are installing onto. of course, that's a different problem, in more
>> than one way, at least one of which is that lsb_release is not installed
>> by default.
>>
>> I'm switching the app installer for the program I maintain (at work)
>> to use lsb_release just because it's so much easier than  groping
>> /etc/redhat-release.
>>
>
>
> have you looked at /etc/os-release ? you can just source it and you get
> the content needed. I believe most people are trying to drive towards
> using that ( plus you dont need the lsb dep chain under it then )

I'm sorry, but I'm starring at
http://vault.centos.org/3.1/i386/RedHat/RPMS/centos-release-3.1-1.i386.rpm.
That primary configuration file reference of /etc/redhat-release dates
back at least to 2004, and I'm quite confused by why anyone wanted to
change it.

Mind you, *Fedora* is getting silly about things upsream When they
used both Unicode and bash syntatically relevant punction in the ine
release name for Fedora 19, which was "Schrödinger's Cat", it broke
even more tools.

                 Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>