On Thu, 5 Jul 2018 14:57:03 -0500 Nicholas Geovanis <nickgeova...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am rightly accused of relying too heavily on /etc/debian_version to > detect my running release. But it seems clear > to me that the "right", canonical way to detect this is to query the > installed package base to extract a version/release > number from a package name and/or version. So surely there is an > "approved" tool for doing that. Hopefully OTHER THAN > apt, aptitude, synaptic or apt-get; ideally simpler and easier to > script than that. I would expect dpkg to be a better bet than apt, as it's more primitive. Manually, I use dpkg -l with a grep to find version numbers. But it's odd that you're the first to point out (indirectly) that knowing the version of Debian isn't that useful. This is *Debian*. Quite a few users will have at least one backport or locally-compiled package, and there will be a few people who have almost tamed a frankendebian. If your application depends on a particular version of a *package*, then it makes sense to enquire which version of that package is installed, not which version of Debian is running. -- Joe
