Re: Is there a way to positively, uniquely identify which Debian release a program is running on?
On Sun, 3 Jun 2007 23:16:08 +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
<jfs@computer.org> said:
> Since when do programs == package? You don't seem to understand that
> I'm talking in a generic way about software. Actually, I'm mainly
> talking about software which is *not* part of the package management
> system [1]. I agree with you that packages *in* Debian should not use
> /etc/debian_version or lsb_release, but what of software (not
> packages) *outside* Debian.
> Think about Enterprise (non-free) software like Oracle, HP Openview,
> Tivoli, Remedy... Do you expect vendors of this software to
> understand^Wimplement package management based dependencies for *all*
> Linux distributions? LSB tries to simplify the Linux environment for
> such software. Lsb_release is defined as the an answer to the question
> "which distribution am I running in and which release is it?"
> Developers of such software, taking the LSB as a reference, can use
> lsb_release to determine where they are in. However, if we "lie" [2]
> to these tools we are actually making this software break.
Frankly, helping vendors of non-free software lies far below the
ability to provide our users the option to do partial upgrades,
apt-pinning, etc.
If we are not going to impact the utility to the users; I am
indifferent to adding things to help non-free software vendors.
manoj
--
It's easy to solve the halting problem with a shotgun. :-) Larry Wall
in <199801151836.KAA14656@wall.org>
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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