Bug#944351: Providing minor version somewhere in /etc/os-release in buster

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Sat, Nov 09, 2019 at 02:10:45PM +0000, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> Control: tags -1 + moreinfo
> 
> On Fri, 2019-11-08 at 13:17 +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > I received this bug from one of the ansible upstream authors:
> > 
> > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931197
> > 
> > asking to include information about minor version somewhere in
> > /etc/os-release.
> > 
> > I first said "not yet" because we were very close to the release of
> > buster and the behaviour of /etc/debian_version and /etc/os-release
> > was already "documented" or "announced" in base-files changelog, as
> > usual. My plan was to consider that for bullseye.
> > 
> > However, there is a glitch in lsb-release:
> > 
> > https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=939733
> > 
> > We could revert the change in lsb-release so that it looks at
> > /etc/debian_version again, but we could also do the change
> > in base-files now and fix this glitch in the most standard way.
> > 
> > So: Would you approve that base-files 10.3+deb10u2 for Debian 10.2
> > has VERSION_ID="10.2" in /etc/os-release (and 10.x from now on)
> > instead of "10"?
> 
> To confirm, is the proposal to end up with:
> 
> PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)"
> NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
> VERSION_ID="10.2"
> VERSION="10 (buster)"
> 
> ?

That's what I would like to be but unfortunately, I'm not 100% sure.
I'm awaiting for reply from the ansible maintainer who contacted me
and also from the LSB maintainers.

The complain in Bug #939733 is that "lsb_release -d" does not show the
point release (and that would not be "fixed" by updating VERSION_ID),
but according to Simon McVittie in Bug#914287.

  lsb_release -d

    os-release PRETTY_NAME looks suitable for this. It can include the
    OS vendor, version number and/or codename. One difference is that
    stretch has PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)", without
    the 9.6; but I don't think that's a very important distinction, so
    it might make most sense for $(lsb_release -ds) in the buster
    release to be "Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)" across all point
    releases.


So I think we could change VERSION_ID and nothing else and interpret
Bug #939733 in the sense that the minor version should be in
/etc/os-release just "somewhere". I also would like to think that this
should be enough for ansible to implement {{ ansible_distribution_minor_version }}
without being too much hackish.

Cc:ing interested parties again.

(If we can't sort this out for 10.2 I'll have to upload base-files for
10.2 as usual. What's the real deadline for that? This weekend?)

Thanks.