[Linuxcoe-devel] DiStRo nAmInG and code reliance

[Bryan G. <bry...@hp...>]

FYI,

For some time, I have been watching some of our users struggle with
how to name their OSVEND entries (and thus all of the config file
snippets).  Bottom line it comes down to a matter of consistency, but
since our code currently does some specific checks (eg. Fedora), they
are really stuck with our naming conventions.

I recently did some looking around at the various distros and was kinda
surprised/disappointed as to the lack of consistency there as well:

  CentOS
    (pretty consistent except for directory structures centos)

  Debian
    (refers to itself in text this way, yet all logos and d/loads are "debian")

  Fedora
    (same camp as Debian/debian)

  openSUSE
    (over time they have migrated to this capitalization, and are now
     surprisingly consistent)

  RedHat
    (chuckle, on their home page alone there are instances of REDHAT, RedHat, redhat with and without spacing)

  Scientific
    (seems fairly consistent as Scientific Linux or SL)

  SuSE
    (seems Novell has migrated to SUSE, save for the directory structure suse,
     and all of their current offerings are SLE*)

  Ubuntu
    (same camp as Debian/debian)

  VMWare
    (mostly go by VMware)

So, I was wondering about this possibility.  In the code, should we perhaps
do all our checks as "DISTRO" or maybe "distro" and then frontend all of
our parsing with the respective toupper or tolower functions to be as
liberal with inputs, and strict with outputs?

bryang