uname output ?

[pll at lanminds.com]

In a message dated: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 11:59:25 EDT
mike ledoux said:

>That's what I thought you were going to say.  Of course, as pointed out
>elsethread, that method is quite unreliable, at least for Red Hat.

Well, yeah, which has been my complaint for a long time.  There is no 
reliable method to determine distro and release under Linux.

The lsb_release package does offer promise, but again, it's an 
optionally installed package at least on Debian (I don't know
about those which are now "lsb compliant").

As Derek pointed out, it would be best if distribution providers 
customized the uname fields appropriately for their next release.
However, even that ultimately won't help unless they make those 
packages dependant upon something else like lsb_release.

For example, if I have a RH 6.2 system, I might well upgrade the 
sh-utils package to that which shipped with 7.3.  Does uname now 
report that I'm using 7.3 or 6.2?  How does it determine this?
If it relies upon the lsb_release package, how does this determine 
which release I'm on?  Does it rely upon /etc/redhat_release?  What 
if this is not correct.  This is not an easy problem to solve :(

-- 

Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.

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