Marc-Andre Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> added the comment:

I'm -1 on adding any kind of replacement for platform.linux_distribution() tp 
Python's stdlib. The experiment has failed and we should acknowledge this.

The main reason why it failed was the Linux distros keep inventing new ways to 
identify themselves, sometimes misuse existing mechanisms to maintain 
compatibility (e.g. as a Ubuntu or RedHat based OS) or ship with two different 
release files.

At the time we removed the API, we said that people should use PyPI package to 
get this information, since those can much more easily be maintained with the 
ever changing patterns distributions use or invent.

The distro package is one package and if it doesn't satisfy the needs, simply 
create a new one which does.

Note that the original implementation had a mechanism to read such release 
files. Even the names of those files changed every few years. People appear to 
have settled on "os-release" nowadays, since using "<distro>-release" was found 
to create too much confusion, but this is not fixed and when it comes to 
parsing the contents, I'm pretty sure that there a subtle differences in how to 
interpret them between distros.

Then the LSB standardized this and wanted everyone to use lsb_release. Guess 
what... The tool is not even installed anymore by default on recent OpenSUSE 
releases. Experience shows that these things change too often to make the 
stdlib a good place to maintain support for this.

----------
nosy: +lemburg

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