[arch-general] arch-release

[richard terry]

On Wednesday 26 August 2009 18:04:42 Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:56:13 +0200
>
> Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 17:45 +1000, richard terry wrote:
> > > /etc/arch-release
> > >
> > > Anyone know what is meant to be in this file
> > >
> > > The guys on the gambas user list are writing some sort of script so
> > > users can identify details of their system  in case of bugs etc,
> > > and i was asked if this file exists, which is does, but it is empty?
> > >
> > > ?any other unique arch identifiers.
> >
> > As Arch is a rolling release system, we decided to remove the file.
> > But as tools use this file to identify Arch systems, we decided to
> > keep the file, but make it empty.
>
> maybe we should delete it.
> Did you mean 'identifying whether a system is arch linux' (which seems
> pretty pointless, you know when a system is arch linux) OR do you mean
> 'identify which "version" an arch system is' ? Assuming the latter, a
> better "system identification" would be something like `pacman -Q`
>
> Dieter

Thanks for the replies, me I didn't mean anything, they just asked me what was 
in the file.

pacman -Q obviously not the answer, but whilst on that  - is it possible to do 
a pacman -Q, save the output somewhere, then on another machine, just reverse 
the process? Would save me heaps of time putting a system back together as 
happened last week when i had to replace my HDD, taken me ages to 'remember' 
everything I had on it.


Richard