[WBEL-devel] An "Issue" with WBEL (pun intended)

[Simon J Mudd]

webmaster@ew3d.com (John Hinton) writes:

> I was just trying to install Webmin on WBEL. Turns out it looks in
> /etc/issue to discover the version of Linux and installs based on
> that. Yup, my issue is that issue is changed to White Box and Webmin
> can't see it. I've contacted the auther of Webmin about adding up to
> his list of good OSs. Well, anyway... at the moment what I need is the
> original RHEL content of the 'issue' file so I can solve my issue! ;)

This is something which I think is an important issue to address.
How similar to RH does WBL want to be?

I understand the need to distinguish the product from RHEL3 but I
think it is a mistake if applications have to do special things to
recognise the OS.

It would be better IMO that the redhat-release package mimicked the RH
version, and perhaps whatever other tests are generally will work
equally well on WBL.  That way applications designed for RHEL should
recognise WBL as RHEL and should generally work without
problems... AND vice versa. This provides a larger audience to the
software for both OSes.

However it would be handy to have an officially recognised way of
checking if the OS is WBL, and determining its release.  That way all
applications can consistently perform the same check and determine
which version of WBL is being used.  Whether this is to check the
output of rpm -q whitebox-release, or look at /etc/whitebox-release
does not really matter it is the need for a consistent test which can
be used if necessary.

Most other RPM based Linuxes do not appear to be consistent with this
and this makes it complicated determining on which OS an application
is running.

Simon