[plt-scheme] OS version?

On Dec  9, Anton van Straaten wrote:
> Eli Barzilay wrote:
> >>Major distributions often alter uname -a to report the distro name
> >>as well as the kernel version.  [...]
> > 
> > 
> > RedHat/Fedora don't do this.
> 
> I don't know if it's better or worse than what you already have, but
> the script on this page:
> 
> http://dev.i2p.net/pipermail/i2p-cvs/2004-August/003274.html
> 
> ...uses a combination of "uname -a" and grepping /proc/version to
> figure out the distro (see the "osid" script).

Cute idea -- but it doesn't deal with the distro version, and it fails
for my machine (Fedora, but doesn't have "Fedora" in /proc/version so
it returns "redhat").


> One thing to note about /proc/version is that on at least some
> virtual servers, including both Virtuozzo and UML, the specified
> distribution is that of the host machine, but that's misleading for
> install purposes because the guest OS may be different.

That's not a problem -- I just needed some hack for the build script,
not for creating installers.  (It's a nice idea -- have the installer
contain platform independent files in its embedded tgz, and sub
archives that have binaries for different platforms -- and when it's
run, detect the OS and unpack the right binaries.)


> There are also the following files (from
> http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-27768.html):
> 
> Novell SuSE 	/etc/SuSE-release
> Red Hat 	/etc/redhat-release
> Fedora 		/etc/fedora-release
> Slackware 	/etc/slackware-release
> Debian 		/etc/debian_release
> Mandrake 	/etc/mandrake-release
> Yellow dog 	/etc/yellowdog-release
> Sun JDS 	/etc/sun-release
> Solaris/Sparc 	/etc/release
> Gentoo 		/etc/gentoo-release
> 
> I notice that on recent Debians at least, /etc/debian_release
> doesn't exist, but /etc_debian_version does.

It would be nice if everyone would just standardize on something...


>  > Actually, the problem came up with a newer Ubuntu that has
>  > "testing/unstable" in [/etc/debian_version].
> 
> I'm no expert, but isn't that because the current Debian stable
> release, and older releases, are the only ones with version numbers?
> I also have "testing/unstable" in my /etc/debian_release on an
> official Debian AMD64 setup (i.e. not Ubuntu).  Of course,
> "testing/unstable" could mean just about anything, depending on when
> the OS was last updated.

(I'm pretty lost when it gets to such Debian technicalities...)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!