[issue1322] platform.dist() has unpredictable result under Linux

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com> added the comment:

doko: thanks for your interest encouraging more formal and generic
solutions to this.


For what it is worth, the current version of my patch (used in Tahoe) is
here:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/src/allmydata/__init__.py?rev=20081125155118-92b7f-f74fc964ebd9d3c59afde68b6688c56ce20cca39#L31

I had to add a special case for Arch Linux, which gets triggered after
the three main cases.  The cases currently are, in order:

1.  Parse /etc/lsb-release (fast, semi-de-facto-standard, generic,
hopefully a future de-jure-standard).
2.  Invoke the Python Standard Library's platform.dist() (pros: fast,
has lots of customized special cases for different linux distros, cons:
has lots of customized special cases for different linux distros, gives
bogus answers for Ubuntu and Arch Linux)
3.  Subprocess execute "lsb_release" (pros: a real de-jure-standard!
cons: slow, and is not actually a de-facto-standard since many important
Linux installations don't come by default with the package that provides
the de-jure-standard "lsb_release" executable, even though they do come
by default with the de-facto-semi-standard "/etc/lsb-release" file).
4.  Arch Linux

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