Patches are, as always, welcome. But maintaining a separate etch branch of the lsb package (or of base-files) is unrealistic, and almost certainly would not be approved by the release managers.
More importantly, there is no real heuristic for figuring out whether or not a system is "testing" or "unstable." Even if /etc/debian_version was modified in etch, that's no guarantee the system is actually "etch" - and no guarantee of what day's etch (if any) it was. It could be the etch from the day sarge/3.1 was frozen, or etch from the day before etch was promoted to the release. Or it could be a bastardized, half-upgraded hybrid of sid, etch, and sarge. The best you can hope for is that the "codename" line might be changed to read "etch/sid". And, the only proper way to check whether you have an up-to-date version of a package is to check against the latest packages files for each relevant release, something that is well beyond the scope of lsb_release. Relying on the system's idea of what distribution it is running isn't going to help you figure out whether the bug is in testing or unstable. Chris
