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Author lemburg
Recipients christian.heimes, cstratak, doko, lemburg, matrixise, pmpp, r.david.murray, vstinner
Date 2020-11-25.10:11:30
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Message-id <5d51fc78-252b-52f1-e591-9709aee22f55@egenix.com>
In-reply-to <1606297148.59.0.745360910954.issue28468@roundup.psfhosted.org>
Content
On 25.11.2020 10:39, Christian Heimes wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> That's pointless speculation -- unless you found a fool-proof way to see into the future.
>
> Where do you draw the line? Should the stdlib ignore any standard and API that is less than 10 years old? 20 years?

It's not pointless. The rate of change in the field is why this
particular API did not work out in practice. It was working fine
at the time I added it, but then quickly became unmaintainable.

Note that I'm not saying it's a useless API. The main point is
that such code is better placed into a PyPI package, where it
can be updated more frequently and also in a safe way across
Python versions.

Additionally, such a package could provide normalization features,
to make matching distros easier, even when the distros decide
to change the way they are named, e.g. for marketing purposes.

The distro package is doing a pretty good job at this.

If you need this for tests in the stdlib, I'd suggest to add a helper
to the test package to find the needed information for the platforms
where you want to run platform dependent tests.

For tests outside the stdlib, the distro package will do the
job just fine.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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History
Date User Action Args
2020-11-25 10:11:30lemburgsetrecipients: + lemburg, doko, vstinner, christian.heimes, r.david.murray, pmpp, matrixise, cstratak
2020-11-25 10:11:30lemburglinkissue28468 messages
2020-11-25 10:11:30lemburgcreate