Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2019 11:10:38 -0700 From: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> To: "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org> Subject: Creating /etc/os-release Message-ID: <CANCZdfre=jOatW-A1Ke3X10Tt1hPq3ePmR0KpWfFX9z7w9cK3Q@mail.gmail.com>
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Greetings, A standard has evolved in other communities to communicate certain key aspects of the system to interested parties. The /etc/os-release file. The standard is defined here http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/os-release and here https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os-release.html . It has become a de-facto standard for the graphical systems. FreeBSD currently tries to address this with a port sysutils/etc_os-release, but there's a number of issues with it, see for example https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=238953. The biggest issue being that we can't install a static file: it has to change as the system is updated. To that end, I propose the following: First, we create a /etc/os-release symlink to /var/run/os-release. This will place the file in the standard place, but allow its generation on each boot in a friendly to read-only-root manner. Second, we create a /etc/rc.d/os-release script that will populate /var/run/os-release. Since this is a standard rc script, we can allow people to opt-out of generating this file in a standardized way (although it contains information that's available to anybody on the system, some reduced configurations may not have all the scripts / programs used to generate it). If the file isn't generated, then opening it will return the same not found error as before. Since this is a symlink, it's friendly to etcupdate / mergemaster updating schemes. Finally, we'd obsolete the port since it is flawed anyway. I opted for every boot rather than a file in /etc that gets generated as part of mergemaster / etcupdate because it's more robust (the change happens right away, and works in all environments, even if /etc isn't updated). The amount of work here is tiny as well, so all but the most demanding of users won't notice it at all. While this does come from the Linux community, it has become a de-facto standard. DragonflyBSD has it, for example, since 9c172c37, but their implementation is flawed for us to use directly since it creates it at installworld time and we don't touch /etc as part of installworld. We also have a port, but there's enough flaws in the port approach that we should just make this be part of the base system to place nicely with software that expects it today. It also means we don't need hacks for freebsd-update. Finally, since this change is additive, we can also MFC it to 12. I've created a change that I think covers all these aspects. Please see https://reviews.freebsd.org/D22271 for the specifics. Comments about the code should go there, while comments about the plan should go here. Warner
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