On 25.11.2020 10:06, Christian Heimes wrote:
> 
> It's not a replacement for platform.linux_distribution().

Right, not even that :-)

It would be an interface to a file /etc/os-release
that's common nowadays, just like /etc/lsb-release was some years
ago. These things change too often to make the stdlib a good fit.
I'm pretty sure distros will invent something new in 5 years which
would then render the API mostly useless again.

To get a sense of the complexity involved in all this, have a look
at how Ansible does this:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/ea119d30894478b84b5fbe271f580cb2b0401b86/lib/ansible/module_utils/facts/system/distribution.py

It's not just about the file name, the content also needs a lot
of massaging to make it useful for a general purpose API. And
the content quirks are not set in stone either. Here's a ticket
where Debian, for example, drops the version info from the file:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/19874

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