Bug 17487

Summary: /etc/mageia-release file content does not follow convention
Product: Mageia Reporter: Andreas Maier <andreas.r.maier>
Component: Release (media or process)Assignee: Mageia Bug Squad <bugsquad>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: Normal CC: ennael1, sysadmin-bugs, tmb
Version: 5   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Source RPM: CVE:
Status comment:

Description Andreas Maier 2016-01-13 11:12:01 CET
Description of problem:

The /etc/mageia-release file of Mageia 5 has this content:

    Mageia release 5 (Official) for x86_64

According to a widely used convention for these one-line Linux release files, their format is:

    <distroname> release <version> (<codename>)

where the keyword "release" and the (<codename>) part are optional.

This convention is used by many other Linux distros (RHEL, Fedora, SLES/openSUSE, Slackware, ...).

The issues with the current content of the /etc/mageia-release file are:

1. It causes parsers to incorrectly obtain "Official" for the codename of the release.

2. Parsers may stumble across the text "for x86_64" after the closing parenthesis.

We are currently writing a Python module for determining the distro release, and we can deal with issue 2, but not with issue 1.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

Mageia 5

How reproducible:

Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. cat /etc/mageia-release


Reproducible: 

Steps to Reproduce:
Rémi Verschelde 2016-01-13 11:24:28 CET

CC: (none) => ennael1, tmb

Comment 1 Thomas Backlund 2016-01-13 13:28:36 CET
Well, we dont really use code names as such as that is completely useless info

So we only switch between (Official) and (Cauldron) to expose status of install...

For example current development systems that are to become Mageia 6 now states:
Mageia release 6 (Cauldron) for x86_64

and the arch info part: "for x86_64" is useful info so it will stay.

And you already have all info you need:

the beginning of the file states:
Mageia release 5

So the info you need is there:

Distro is:  Mageia
Release is: 5

Thats all you need... 
the rest the parser gets could be piped to /dev/null if you want...

And if you intent to parse files like this you should really start looking into parsing /etc/os-release for all systemd based distros as you then only need to search for one file and get all important info from that, no need to search for "/etc/*-release" depending on distro...

Status: NEW => RESOLVED
Resolution: (none) => WONTFIX