 2️⃣8️⃣ Here's the 28th post highlighting key new features of the current v257 release of systemd. #systemd257 (systemd v257 has been released now, but I am not done with this series yet, 10 more posts to go, including this one.) Early during systemd's creation we introduced the /etc/os-release file which carries information about the system's OS in a generic fashion. It has found very wide adoption, even beyond the systemd world (for example Solaris and FreeBSD have it). 2 comments
With v257 we added three new fields to it: RELEASE_TYPE= encodes what kind of OS release the system is on – it takes "stable", "lts", "development" or "experiment" as value. In particular the latter is useful to use as hint for modifying the system's UI slightly to indicate that the system is running an experimental OS release. The two other new fields EXPERIMENT= and EXPERIMENT_URL= may be used include additional metainformation about the release if it is marked as "experiment". |
Gregory's Server
I guess many of the systemd detractors don't even realize that /etc/os-release is a systemd-ism.
Over the years the failed acquired various fields. It no longer just describes the distribution a system was installed with, but on image based systems it describes the image itself. It gained fields for describing the end of support, and where to find the release notes. And it's extensible: various distributions add their own fileds (hopefully properly prefixed by a namespace prefix!).