Peter wrote: >>> I would love to see /etc/os-release added to CentOS5 and CentOS6 as well. Keep up the good work! >> >> But os-release is a systemd "feature"*. Seems unlikely to make it ? > > Really? On my system it's a very simple text file included with the > centos-release package. I honestly can't see how having sys-v-init or > upstart would make it impossible or even remotely difficult to create > such a text file and include it in CentOS 5 and 6. Sure, and as such it's probably "better" than the lsb_release *program*. But you would still have to install something extra, in the old releases ? Most downstream usage of the distro/release is plain wrong*, anyway... * easier to check a name/version, than to bother with packages and so-files and programs and other dependencies... just hope they don't rebase anything. Go ahead and use the silly name of the distro file. I'm sure I'll survive :-) >> I don't think it's possible to change all redhat-release usage anyway. > > Well, fortunately it's not redhat-release, that's a package that comes > with RHEL. CentOS comes with the package centos-release which is > specific to CentOS and therefore we should be able to make changes to > without worrying about upstream constraints. Actually I think there was an effort to rename it as /etc/system-release, but not sure it caught on ? The "traditional" was always redhat-release... And sure, centos-release is specific to CentOS just as fedora-release is specific to Fedora. But ignoring upstream/legacy constraints seems wrong ? i.e. /etc/redhat-release is a symlink to it, so the syntax does matter. But it seems that /etc/centos-release-upstream will provide the new info. Hopefully that (and your os-release) will be enough to make everyone happy. And for the OS rant earlier, I suppose there's always uname(1) and arch(1). --anders