[PATCH] Generate os-release from component parts

[Stephen Gallagher]

> On Mar 10, 2015, at 10:14 PM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis at ausil.us> wrote:
> 
>> On Tuesday, March 10, 2015 04:22:43 PM Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>> One of the pieces that we've been missing from the Fedora.next plan
>> has been a proper way to programmatically identify which Edition a
>> user has installed. One of the most common approaches has been to use
>> the /etc/os-release file to handle this, by passing a VARIANT=
>> variable in its syntax.
>> 
>> This patch attempts to accomplish that, while maintaining the spirit
>> of the move of /etc/os-release into /usr/lib. This patch adds a
>> systemd service unit and a helper script to generate /etc/os-release
>> from a simple drop directory.
>> 
>> The traditional /etc/os-release is now located at
>> /usr/lib/os.release.d/00-system.conf and Edition-specific additions to
>> this are now added to edition-$EDITION.inc and symlinked to 01-
>> edition.conf.
>> 
>> Thus, on every boot, /etc/os-release will be generated from the
>> contents of /usr/lib/os.release.d. Moreover, this provides us an API
>> for allowing other packages to supplement /etc/os-release (where
>> sensible).
>> 
>> Comments and criticism welcome; this is a first rough attempt. The
>> patch attached only applies to Rawhide at this point, but if we decide
>> it's a good approach prior to F22 Beta, I can write a backport as well.
> 
> I am not opposed to doing something, but I am not sure this is right. there is 
> some builds that need /etc/os-release to be present and setup to build.

Dennis, can you get me some specific examples I can look at and account for? Also see below for why this may not be an issue.


> I 
> think that systemd itself needs /usr/lib/os-release and/or /etc/os-release to 
> be present to actually boot the system. 
> 

Zbigniew, is this accurate? Does systemd need this file on the disk to boot?

In any case, I think this may not be an issue in the current approach, as I'm generating the file at package install time as well at each boot, so the previous boot's os-release file will be there.

I do need to change %post to call the script directly instead of using the service, though. Otherwise that will fail during anaconda.



> perhaps we should take the approach that we put /usr/lib/os-release in place 
> and make the /etc/os-release symlink, we have the service provided in fedora-
> release but disabled. the preset files for the products enable the service and 
> it replaces the symlink at /etc/os-release with a new file that includes the 
> base os definition and the variant definition.
> 
> Dennis
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