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waitwhat

recently the majority of the big distributions adopted /etc/os-release and many small ones did, too[2]

[2] To our knowledge at least OpenSUSE, Fedora, ArchLinux, Angstrom, Frugalware have adopted this.

So "OpenSUSE, Fedora, ArchLinux, Angstrom, Frugalware" is "the majority of the big distributions" now?

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Debian is quite notably missing from that list.

http://bugs.debian.org/659853

It doesn't have /etc/lsb-release either.

http://bugs.debian.org/444678

Instead the lsb-release program apparently simply outputs the necessary values without using a configuration file.

I'm guessing the debian version of systemd just patches it to handle debian, and not make it autoconfigure each time from a configuration file.

(Sorry, it's hard to judge the right amount of sarcasm on the internet.)

The author of this blog post, Lennart Poettering, apparently works for Red Hat. Even Hat Enterprise Linux is missing from the list. As is CentOS.

I think it's really only missing Debian and Ubuntu to cover the "big distributions", so while "majority" might be a strong word, it does seem to have about half of them.

There also seems to be a bug report for it on Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=659891

One thing I feel people might be missing is that /etc/os-release could be applicable to Mac OS and the BSDs, making it widely applicable.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric:

    ~$ /etc/os-release
    bash: /etc/os-release: No such file or directory

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