Debian and code names

Posted Jul 9, 2019 8:52 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (guest, #17118)
In reply to: Debian and code names by anton
Parent article: Debian and code names

/etc/os-release is file you should be checking.

Debian and code names

Posted Jul 9, 2019 9:53 UTC (Tue) by rschroev (subscriber, #4164) [Link]

It's still annoying.

If the code name is meant to be the main version identifier, it should be used everywhere, instead of a strange mix of code names here and version numbers there.

It doesn't help that there is no obvious way to find the correspondence between code names and version numbers. Maybe there's a list on debian.org, but I can't find it. I can find a list on Wikipedia, but shouldn't a project's own website be the primary source of information for such things?

Also, /etc/os-release is a relatively recent addition. For most of Debian's history, /etc/issue is all we had (or lsb_release -d, but that's not in the standard installation).

Debian and code names

Posted Jul 10, 2019 17:16 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (1 responses)

Might I humbly suggest /usr/lib/os-release instead? While /etc/os-release exists on Debian/Ubuntu, it's merely a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release, which is the standard on most (all?) distros these days.

Debian and code names

Posted Aug 2, 2019 11:29 UTC (Fri) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]

According to https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os-relea...

> The file /etc/os-release takes precedence over /usr/lib/os-release. Applications should check for the former, and exclusively use its data if it exists, and only fall back to /usr/lib/os-release if it is missing. Applications should not read data from both files at the same time.

so it would be wrong to use /usr/lib/os-release instead of /etc/os-release, in theory.