Version & Distribution identification
Matt Taggart
taggart at rascal.fc.hp.com
Tue Apr 25 16:21:05 PDT 2000
Lenz Grimmer writes...
BTW- Debian uses /etc/debian_version and also updates /etc/issue
>I guess naming it "linux-release" could be confused with the version
>number of the linux kernel. What about /etc/distribution-release ?
>
>Some fields that could be part of this file:
>
>VENDOR : the Linux Distributor, e.g. Caldera, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE,
> Turbo Linux, etc.
VENDOR sounds kind of commercial. How about "DISTRIBUTOR" or something?
>NAME: the distribution name (e.g. TurboCluster Server, OpenLinux
> eServer, SuSE IMAP Server)
When Debian implements "flavors" those could go in this field.
>VERSION: the distribution version
Distributors will want their version numbers to sort properly so people can
test against them. For example,
if DISTRIBUTION = "Redhat" and VERSION >= "6.1"
so it might be useful to have guidelines for version numbering.
>ARCH: the hardware architecture, e.g. i386, alpha, PPC (not sure, if
> this is useful)
uname -m
However this field maybe useful if you are installing to a chroot.
Stuart Anderson writes...
>Using a format such as
>
>FOO="bar"
>
>would allow scripts to source this file to gain access to the info while
>remaining easy to parse from a program.
and you could source it from a shell script.
--
Matt Taggart
taggart at fc.hp.com
More information about the lsb-discuss
mailing list