Thoughts on std.system.OS

[Marco Leise]

Am 13.08.2011, 13:12 Uhr, schrieb Vladimir Panteleev  
<vladimir at thecybershadow.net>:

> Really? I've *never* seen the `uname -a` shell command (which I assume  
> is just a thin syscall wrapper) print out the distro name.

# uname -r
2.6.39-gentoo-r3

It seems to work, and return the Kernel package version more or less. So  
here it is the Gentoo package in the 3rd revision.

Files to look for distributions / versions:
1) /etc/*-release
2) /etc/slackware-version
3) /proc/version

The release file seems to have become a pseudo standard. /proc/version  
gives the kernel version which I find more interesting than the  
distribution version. Both have their use of course. Some versions of  
distributions may come with a configuration that is incompatible to your  
program, so a way to figure that out would help. Also there are subtle  
differences for example in how the default Java installation is found, how  
the filesystem is laid out etc.