In a message dated: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 16:11:25 PST
"Karl J. Runge" said:
>Hi Paul,
>
>Could you give more detail on what you are trying to do?
>
>It sounds like you are trying to write a program or script that
>is portable across the various distros (or, how dated of me, multiple
>Unixes). That sort of portability is a GoodThing!
>
>Anyway, from your listing of the /etc/ release files it seems like
>you are on the road to an alogorithm and I just wanted to know
>what sort of problem you were currently addressing.
Basically it started out with the Kickstart server we were building
here. We have it set up pretty modularly such that it should work
for any version of RH. Then I began thinking that it would be pretty
cool to build in the functionality to be able to, at install time,
differentiate between desktops and clients (I used to do this with
Solaris JumpStart).
That led me looking at a script Derek wrote which installs the proper
autofs package on a Debian, RH, or Mandrake system. So I started
looking at that and realized it would be pretty neat if we could
write some generic scripts in this style to automagically install
various packages. In order to make it simple, we'd need the script
to first be able to determine which distribution the system is
running, then which release of that distribution.
In the old days is was fairly simple with uname to determine exactly
which vendor you were dealing with and which rev of their OS, since
the OS name was different between vendors, and the architecture was
also easily discernible from uname output.
But with Linux, the OS name is always 'Linux' and for the most part
the architecture is always 'iX86'. There's nothing in uname which
outputs which distribution. What we need is a 'distname' or
something, where the usage is similar to uname, but it tells you what
dist you're running, and what rev:
$ distname -a
Debian Gnu/Linux potato 2.2r4
$distname
Debian Gnu/Linux
$ distname -n
potato
$ distname -r
2.2r4
In general it's a simple concept. The problem is that since there is
no standard for placing this information anywhere, it's impossible to
make sure it works everywhere. RH, Mandrake, and SuSE all use
/etc/<distname>_release for this information, but the format is
different for each one:
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Linux release 6.2 (Zoot)
$ cat /etc/mandrake-release
Linux Mandrake release 8.0 (Traktopel) for i586
$ cat /etc/SuSE-release
SuSE Linux 7.1 (i386)
Version=7.1
And Debian has almost nothing useful in there file at all!
$ cat /etc/debian_version
testing/unstable
If there were at least some standard file format where this
information could be kept across all distributions, it would be
trivial to write a script that did what I wanted. I could still do
it, and probably will (though the Debian output won't work well), but
it's going to have an awful lot of if...then clauses in it :)
I could probably do it with perl pretty simply, but, well, this is a
system level script, and should probably be written in sh ;)
Really, I just wanted to rant about something :)
Thanks,
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
God Bless America!
...we don't need to be perfect to be the best around,
and we never stop trying to be better.
Tom Clancy, The Bear and The Dragon
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