improved detection of distro_name()

[alekibango]

using executable lsb_release
or files:
/etc/lsb-release
/etc/os-release

to determine short distro id

also adding debian_version to sentinel files - allowing fallback
detection of debian (or derived) system.

[bitprophet]

Thanks, this looks good, though I haven't had time to test it out yet.

One question: would it make sense to replace the awk usage with Python-level string manipulation? Right now, I'm thinking it'd be safest to default to doing things at the Python level so our dependencies on remote tools is lower.

Granted, awk and sed and friends are nigh universal, but even they can have subtle differences per-platform (eg BSD vs GNU) so if it's easy to do it in Python, I figure why not.

If something is 1 line in awk vs, say,10 lines in Python, that might be a different story :)

[alekibango]

my awk code should be multiplatform enough :) but ok, i somewhat agree with rewrite

in that case, we should imho write simple functions for some generic operations...
see you later on irc

[bitprophet]

Spun up a Centos 5.7 box today and noticed it only has /etc/redhat-release, no centos-release. (The file does contain "CentOS" though.)

[clement-lefevre]

That's true that I saw this file on CentOS 6.2 and havn't thinked to look at 5.X.

In all cases, RHEL and CentOS are similar and should works identically (and if it's a problem, I guess it must read redhat-release and parse it.