[systemd-devel] CODENAME field in /etc/os-release

[Andreas Maier]

Hello,
I have tried to search the archives of this mailing list for "CODENAME" 
but that searched the entire freedesktop.org site...

Anyway, at the danger that this has been discussed before, I'd like to 
make this

Proposal:

Add CODENAME as an officially described field to /etc/os-release.

Its value would be the release code name, for human consumption.
It would be optional. If not specified, it would have no default.

Justification:

The benefit of adding this field is that this is the only information 
from other release files that is still missing from /etc/os-release 
(compared to the output of the lsb_release command, ignoring LSB 
compliance information for the moment, and compared to the older 
one-line distro release files). Therefore, this helps with the migration 
from these other file formats to /etc/os-release.

Alternatives considered:

According to the description of extension fields in 
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os-release.html, a field 
with this name should not be added by OS vendors as an extension field, 
because the highly recommended convention for extension field names is 
to prefix them with an OS specific name. So the alternative of a distro 
specific extension field is not good for this purpose, and the only 
reasonable option is to have a standard field.

Comments?

Andy

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