Ancestors

Written by Lennart Poettering on 2024-12-11 at 08:46

2️⃣8️⃣ Here's the 28th post highlighting key new features of the current v257 release of systemd. #systemd257

(systemd v257 has been released now, but I am not done with this series yet, 10 more posts to go, including this one.)

Early during systemd's creation we introduced the /etc/os-release file which carries information about the system's OS in a generic fashion. It has found very wide adoption, even beyond the systemd world (for example Solaris and FreeBSD have it).

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pid_eins@mastodon.social

Written by Lennart Poettering on 2024-12-11 at 08:50

I guess many of the systemd detractors don't even realize that /etc/os-release is a systemd-ism.

Over the years the file acquired various fields. It no longer just describes the distribution a system was installed with, but on image based systems it describes the image itself. It gained fields for describing the end of support, and where to find the release notes. And it's extensible: various distributions add their own fileds (hopefully properly prefixed by a namespace prefix!).

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pid_eins@mastodon.social

Toot

Written by Lennart Poettering on 2024-12-11 at 08:53

With v257 we added three new fields to it: RELEASE_TYPE= encodes what kind of OS release the system is on – it takes "stable", "lts", "development" or "experiment" as value. In particular the latter is useful to use as hint for modifying the system's UI slightly to indicate that the system is running an experimental OS release.

The two other new fields EXPERIMENT= and EXPERIMENT_URL= may be used include additional metainformation about the release if it is marked as "experiment".

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pid_eins@mastodon.social

Descendants

Written by Lennart Poettering on 2024-12-11 at 08:55

In retrospect it's kinda surprising we introduced these fields only this late, they seem so obvious to me now, as they are such fundamental and important parameters of an OS release. But hey, who wouldn't know better in retrospect?

Anyway, if you are looking for more information on these new fileds (or the file in general), please consult the man page:

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/os-release.html

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pid_eins@mastodon.social

Written by Lennart Poettering on 2024-12-11 at 08:58

And if you develop a distribution, please take some time to maybe add RELEASE_TYPE= (and possibly the other two fields) to your /etc/os-release file to categorize your releases as appropriate.

=> More informations about this toot | More toots from pid_eins@mastodon.social