Nice summary. And when people ask me why Linux is the way it is, I point at an example like this one and say 'This is why.'
It would be 'hard' to make lsb_release do what they want (either the maintainers reject their pull requests, or perhaps outright reject their ideas) and its 'easy' to create a new way to do it.
Hence every copy of Linux has some percentage of the 'boring' stuff which works the same everywhere, and the 'interesting' stuff works differently between major distros,
Things are 'boring' if nobody cares about them.
Things are 'interesting' if they are user facing, and especially self contained enough that the entire feature can be shipped in one moderate sized patch.
Comments
Nice summary. And when people ask me why Linux is the way it is, I point at an example like this one and say 'This is why.'
It would be 'hard' to make lsb_release do what they want (either the maintainers reject their pull requests, or perhaps outright reject their ideas) and its 'easy' to create a new way to do it.
Hence every copy of Linux has some percentage of the 'boring' stuff which works the same everywhere, and the 'interesting' stuff works differently between major distros,
Things are 'boring' if nobody cares about them.
Things are 'interesting' if they are user facing, and especially self contained enough that the entire feature can be shipped in one moderate sized patch.