severity 1111436 wishlist thanks On Mon, Aug 18, 2025 at 10:50:08AM +0700, Arnaud Rebillout wrote: > Package: base-files > Version: 13.8 > Severity: normal > User: [email protected] > Usertags: origin-kali > > Dear Santiago, > > in Debian derivatives (such as Kali Linux), we need to fork base-files > and adjust a few things, in particular the name of the distribution, > which is hardcoded to "Debian" in a number of files. > > It would be a bit easier for us if this was configurable, by setting a > variable in debian/rules. > > Please find attached a patch to this effect. > > As you can see the patch is trivial, and maybe a bit too dumb. > > Another (smarter?) approach would be to change the content of the > variable OSNAME to be "Debian GNU/Linux" (instead of just "GNU/Linux"), > and then adjust the templates to just use "#OSNAME#" in place of > "Debian #OSNAME#". > > There's no urgency, we've had a fork of base-files in Kali since the > beginning, and it's straightforward to maintain. But at the same time, > it seems to me that this change is a nice improvement at no cost, it > doesn't really add any complexity to the base-files package.
Thanks for the report. Your patch may look simple and innocent, but every "parameterization" adds some complexity and the problem is that we know how it starts, but we don't know how it can end. See #959471 for an example of a similar request. So, I'm keeping this open as wishlist because I have not decided yet how much support I want to provide to forks (if any at all). Thanks.
