Hi, Another example of a program that is broken by the lack of version information in /etc/os-release is zoom. Zoom refuses to screen share on Debian testing, unstable, etc., because it relies on checking the contents of that file to determine if minimum version requirements are met by the machine.
https://www.guyrutenberg.com/2020/06/22/fixing-zoom-screen-sharing-on-debian-unstable/ This is arguably a bug in zoom (checking the contents of /etc/os- release != checking for screen share success), but getting them to fix it appears to be impossible (lord knows I've tried), and, on the other hand, it also seems there must be something sensible that can be put into /etc/os-release to make it work. Is it really true that no version information whatsoever is the only acceptable solution on Debian's end? Is there a middle ground on this? At least on testing, with the current version of base-files, only the VERSION_ID variable needs to be added to /etc/os-release to fix zoom (not the other stuff shown on that web page). I don't know about unstable, but it's probably the same story. Some example VERSION_ID values I've confirmed fix zoom on testing: "12", " 12", "12 ", "11.999", "9999", "12.pre", "12.testing", "12.2022- 11-30". Some that I've confirmed do not fix it: "11+", "12-", "testing", "12 testing", "inf", "-1". It's hard to say what, exactly, it's looking for, but it seems like "integer[.arbitrary text]" is acceptable to it, although it has some additional flexibility. The leading integer part must >= 9 to allow screen sharing. -Kipp
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