Providing a reliable and unified way to determine the native packaging system of a distribution

[Theodore Papadopoulo]

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	Hi,

I'm new to this list which has been pointed to me as the place to
discuss such things...

Just to present myself, I'm an academic researcher writing quite some
amount of open and not open source code (usually in very specific
fields but not only) and I'm using linux since 15 years at least.

As far as I can tell, there is no simple and reliable way to test waht
is the native packaging system of a linux distribution. Of course, I
can try to maintain a map distribution -> "Packaging system" but given
the number of distributions (and the fact that distribs may appear),
this is quite inconvenient. There are also some heuristics that can be
made (test the existence of /var/lib/rpm or of the binary dpkg...),
but this is probably not very reliable.

So I wondered whether:

1) there is a reliable way I do not know.
2) if not, whether it would be possible to provide this in some
"standard" manner. Surely, it is certainly not very difficult to
extend am existing script (eg lsb_release), or to add one, or even to
add this information to /etc/os-release file.

I admit that the benefit is somewhat small (only interests some
developpers, heuristic can do partially the work), but on the other
hand, it shouldn't require a tremendous amount of work from anyone
(the most difficult part is to agree on where to put the information
and on agreeing on the common syntax).

It looks that this is the mailing list to ask for such questions, so
I'm attempting this suggestion...

	All the best,

	Theo.

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