I took a closer look, and reviewed enough user data sets to refresh my memory about reality re
distro id methods.
Here's the deal: inxi deals with the world as it actually exists, not as pedantic rules would like
the world to be. The empirical reality of how absurdly inconsistent and filthy the system data inxi
has to process is is something I've grown painfully aware of ever since starting inxi. Any notion
that bsds or gnu/linuxes follow consistent methods and rules is a total fantasy, and inxi lives
outside of that fantasy, in the real world. I strive for very high accuracy, not very high
following rules.
The biggest GNU/Linux distribution in the world only shows its correct id in /etc/issue. This was,
incidentally, the second distribution to package inxi. We all dislike that distribution intensely,
for a host of excellent reasons, or should, but the fact is, it's the biggest one out there for user
desktops. It's not ubuntu.
It includes debian_version and os-release, both point to different distributions, and both are wrong
in terms of correctly id'ing that distribution.
It does not have a unique way of identifying it prior to the id process
starting.
So we have Adam, one single person, versus possibly 100s of thousands of users.
I'm going to look at the problem for a bit more, but as it stands, the reasons for making inxi use
the detection methods it uses were based on empirical reality and facts, and those are always what
determines actions I take for improving it.
So I'm obviously not changing a thing in this case until I find a way that does not negatively
impact potentially hundreds of thousands of users just to make Adam happy.
Since the literal issue is correctly handled, so to speak, by simply not showing the distro id when
data corruption is detected, I believe the single place I can inject a fix is IF data shows as
corrupted, and only if, I can then switch in to a repeat of the os-release test, and grab the data
from the os-release file, if it exists, but if and only if the data was corrupted. I can also
improve the data corruption test to check for unexpected characters that point towards corruption
having occurred, using adam's debugger data sample as a guide.
That's as close as I can come to the desired outcome of making adam happy but not messing up
everyone else's output in the process, by making its distro id wrong.
so that's what I'll do. And it will also make inxi slightly better overall,
which is always nice.
That will be in the next inxi update, which should be 2.2.37 I think.
