Developing for LSB

Hi,

Sorry If I've poseted this to the wrong list or if the question has already 
been asked.  I did try to look in the archives, but without an obvious search 
option, I was a little restrained.

From what I have been able to find, /etc/lsb-release or /bin/lsb_release can 
be used to determine if a given platform is LSB compliant and which version 
it is compliant with.  How stable is the format of this information intended 
to be?

For instance, at the moment, I can either parse /etc/lsb-release or the output 
of /bin/lsb_release, but both of these are in human readable format, which 
makes me feel that they may be easily suseptible to change (especially the 
output of  /bin/lsb_release).

I guess my real question is what is the best way for a program to determine 
the LSB version of the platform it is running on?

If there is no definitive way, may I suggest that for future versions of the 
spec, that conforming platforms must set an environment variable (e.g. 
LSB_RELEASE) to the version the platform complies to.

Just an another quick question.  SuSE 8.2 is listed as being LSB 1.3 
compliant, yet /etc/lsb-release and /bin/lsb_release report 1.2 compliance.  
I have reported it to them as a bug (please let me know if it isn't), but 
shouldn't the certification tests pick this sort of thing up?

Cheers,

-- 
Tom Howard