Bug#1042805: base-files: removal of VERSION_ID from /etc/os-release broke zoom screen sharing, please restore
El 1/8/23 a las 6:14, Kipp Cannon escribió:
Package: base-files
Version: 13
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***
Version 13 of base-files removed VERSION_ID from /etc/os-release. As reported
in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1008735 the absence of
this field breaks screen sharing with Zoom. It uses that field to test if
minimum system requirements have been met.
This is not a bug in base-files. The relevant standard is here:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os-release.html
VERSION_ID=
A lower-case string [...] => This field is optional. <=
Debian follows here a long tradition where development releases (testing, unstable)
do not have any version at all as far as they are not stable yet, they only have
a codename.
This tradition probably originated from the faulty Debian "1.0" release, where
a CD vendor took the development version of Debian and released it on CDs before
it was ready for release.
The Debian base-files package implements this idea by only adding the VERSION_ID
field in os-release a few months before stable releases (so that we can properly test
how the system will behave when it has a VERSION_ID).
So, yes, this is a bug in the zoom application. When VERSION_ID is optional, it's
a mistake to take it for granted and assume blindly that it will always exist.
If they believe that the desired feature will work on trixie and later, they
could still check for VERSION_CODENAME, which is now always present.
I have reassigned this report to both base-files and release.debian.org just in case the
Release Managers have anything to say about this, but as far as I know this has been
the official Debian policy for decades and I believe it's very unlikely that we
want to change it just to make a piece of proprietary software to work.
Thanks.
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