On Fri, 02 Aug 2024 at 10:31:29 +0200, Marc Haber wrote: > On Thu, Aug 01, 2024 at 06:58:09PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > > I could echo "ID=windows 3.1" into my local > > /etc/os-release and nothing would stop me or fix it until the next > > stable release. > > Not even automatically. /etc/os-release is a conffile, isnt it?
No, it's canonically a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release which is "owned" by the packaging system (specifically base-files.deb, although Luca's proposal in this thread involves moving it to another package). It's technically possible to delete the symlink, replace it with a regular file and edit the regular file, for example to add a VARIANT or IMAGE_ID - although I'm not sure how that would interact with upgrades, and in practice the situation where you'd be most likely to do that would be an image-based environment where you throw away the image and bootstrap a new one instead of upgrading. smcv