[systemd-devel] [PATCH] Add VARIANT as a standard value for /etc/os-release

Stephen Gallagher sgallagh at redhat.com
Tue Apr 28 14:10:23 PDT 2015


Some distributions (such as Fedora) are using the VARIANT field to
indicate to select packages which of several default configurations
they should be using. For example, VARIANT=Server provides a
different default firewall configuration (blocking basically
everything but SSH and the management console) whereas
VARIANT=Workstation opens many other ports for application
compatibility.

By adding this patch to the manual pages, we can standardize on a
cross-distribution mechanism for accomplishing this.

Fedora implementation details are available at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Per-Product_Configuration
---
 man/os-release.xml | 13 +++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+)

diff --git a/man/os-release.xml b/man/os-release.xml
index 8f4ab10fed78b0f5c0c3842eb27bdef650fbdd93..71261ce77fa0c4f36553b182b54ef6b4a8ee0df7 100644
--- a/man/os-release.xml
+++ b/man/os-release.xml
@@ -272,10 +272,23 @@
         or <literal>BUILD_ID=201303203</literal>.
 
         </para></listitem>
       </varlistentry>
 
+      <varlistentry>
+        <term><varname>VARIANT=</varname></term>
+
+        <listitem><para>
+        A string identifying a specific variant or edition of the
+        operating system. This may be interpreted by other packages in
+        order to determine a divergent default configuration. This
+        field is optional and may not be implemented on all systems.
+        Examples: <literal>VARIANT=Server</literal>,
+        <literal>VARIANT=Embedded</literal>
+        </para></listitem>
+      </varlistentry>
+
     </variablelist>
 
     <para>If you are reading this file from C code or a shell script
     to determine the OS or a specific version of it, use the
     <varname>ID</varname> and <varname>VERSION_ID</varname> fields,
-- 
2.3.6



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