On 29/09/22 13:09, Santiago Vila wrote:
El 31/3/22 a las 13:42, Marc Haber escribió:
/etc/os-release in testing and unstable does not set VERSION, VERSION_ID
and VERSION_CODENAME, which causes, for example, ansible to just emit
"NA" as distribution version, which forces me to special-case testing
and unstable.
[...]
I bet that most installations having a configuration management system
have a small number of testing/unstable boxes in their fleet to
anticipate for possibly necessary changes, and having to special-case
the development versions kind of contradicts this intention.
By definition, testing and unstable only have codenames, not version
numbers, this is something with a long tradition in Debian and I don't
see a strong reason to change it,
The reason is can put forward to break the tradition, is that Debian
testing/unstable is the only rolling distro that lacks a `VERSION_ID`.
Other rolling distros (for example openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS Stream,
Fedora Rawhide) provide `VERSION_ID` in their `/etc/os-releases` files
("20220926" "38", and "8", respectively).
Having no `VERSION_ID` means that other software (ansible, for example)
must carry ad-hoc code to work around this deficiency of Debian.
but I am willing to add
VERSION_CODENAME if it helps, and release managers do not object.
Thanks!
Maybe there was there a time in which lsb_release looked at
/etc/apt/sources.list to determine the Debian version which was
installed, or it was some other tool?
The current version of `lsb_release` relies exclusively on the content
of `etc/os-release`.
Regards,
--
Gioele Barabucci
