Bug#1077764: Ruling request on os-release specification implementation

On Fri, 02 Aug 2024 at 10:31:29 +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 01, 2024 at 06:58:09PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> > I could echo "ID=windows 3.1" into my local
> > /etc/os-release and nothing would stop me or fix it until the next
> > stable release.
> 
> Not even automatically. /etc/os-release is a conffile, isnt it?

No, it's canonically a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release which is "owned"
by the packaging system (specifically base-files.deb, although Luca's
proposal in this thread involves moving it to another package). It's
technically possible to delete the symlink, replace it with a regular
file and edit the regular file, for example to add a VARIANT or IMAGE_ID
- although I'm not sure how that would interact with upgrades, and in
practice the situation where you'd be most likely to do that would be
an image-based environment where you throw away the image and bootstrap
a new one instead of upgrading.

    smcv