2008/3/21, Lyman
Hi, all
I found this issue when I was trying Sysmonitor in the package screenlets because Sysmonitor can not show my distribution name correctly.
At the beginning I thought that it was a bug of screenlets, however, when I dug into its source code, I realized that it could be a "bug" introduced by Archlinux because the /etc/issue starts with some invisible chars.
Here's the hexdump of /etc/issue in Archlinux. It is obviously that the first line in this file is not the distribution name.
00000000 1b 5b 48 1b 5b 32 4a 0a 41 72 63 68 20 4c 69 6e |.[H.[2J.Arch Lin| 00000010 75 78 20 28 43 6f 72 65 20 44 75 6d 70 29 20 20 |ux (Core Dump) | 00000020 5c 72 20 20 28 5c 6e 29 20 28 5c 6c 29 0a 0a |\r (\n) (\l)..|
I've checked other two distribution, CentOS and Ubuntu (that's all I have at the moment), both of them presents the their name in the first line.
I guess most of the applications just use the first line in /etc/issue as distribution name (so do screenlets). I think Archlinux should comply with "Rule of Least Surprise" on this issue. If the invisible chars are just for clearing screen, we can do that from the second line.
We already do. :-) /etc/issue is *not* a way to check for distribution name. Apps that do this are wrong. Most distros have /etc/distroname-release files as well (that contain the version, that's why it's empty in Arch). Good written apps check for *existence* of /etc/arch-release file to know whether they are on Arch Linux. See virtualbox's installer for example how a check for distribution should be made. -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)