Re: Is there a way to positively, uniquely identify which Debian release a program is running on?
On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 04:54:03PM -0400, Kris Deugau wrote:
> Frank Lichtenheld wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 02:51:27PM -0400, Kris Deugau wrote:
> >> (Mildly amusing sidenote to this discussion: I'm finally convincing the
> >> senior systems guy that Packages Are Good, and now developers for the
> >> upstream OS seem to be telling me Packages Are Useless, because I can't
> >> even count on a critical dependency being installed via the package
> >> system. <g>)
> >
> > ? I don't see that beeing said in the thread. Could you point out that
> > for me?
>
> Hmm. Not explicitly stated, nor really implied, but several people
> commented that a system may have backported packages, packages from
> testing/unstable/experimental, software that's installed from source and
> which the package manager is therefore completely unaware of - in other
> words, no matter what you might find in /etc/debian_version or some
> other nominal reference, the configuration and binaries on the system
> may not resemble a stock install of that release at all.
But all of these problems except for the "software not installed as a
package at all" are actually solvable inside the packages system. It is
not solvable by polling a simple one-line file because the system is
too complex for that, but the vastly larger /var/lib/dpkg/status has
all the information you need.
So your reason for stating (admittely half-joking, but still) that
packages are useless is because they can't help you if you don't use
them? That's too lame to be funny, IMHO...
Gruesse,
--
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/
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