Re: ADV: Re: Is there a way to positively, uniquely identify which Debian release a program is running on?

[Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 04:54:03PM -0400, Kris Deugau wrote:

> 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.

That's right.

> Taken to the extreme, that leads me to the conclusion that Packages Are
> Useless.  <g>  (Taken another couple of steps, it leads to "Everyone
> should be running Linux From Scratch".)

You got it completely backwards. The individual packages (and their
versions) are what you _can_ depend on. A single release string can
never give you enough information for what you want to achieve.

And this is not specific to Debian at all; you get the same effects on
RPM-based distros when you start installing packages from 3rd party RPM
repositories.

Gabor

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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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