Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Please consider subscribing to LWN Subscriptions are the lifeblood of LWN.net. If you appreciate this content and would like to see more of it, your subscription will help to ensure that LWN continues to thrive. Please visit this page to join up and keep LWN on the net. |
What's in a string? That depends on who you ask, apparently; a lesson that Fedora recently learned when it unexpectedly ran into a problem with the release name for the upcoming Fedora 19, "Schrödinger's Cat"—and all of the unusual characters contained within. Typographic oddities might seem like a trivial reason to upend the distribution release process, but a validation tool in the bug reporting system objected to the name, so Fedora developers found themselves asking whether it was more practical to stop and fix all of the utilities, or to change the release name itself.
The problem, of course, is that unlike previous Fedora release names,
"Schrödinger's Cat" contains some characters outside of the
basic Latin alphabet: an o with umlaut and an apostrophe.
But the specific issue encountered in the wild is even more specific
than that; the "apostrophe" in question is frequently typed as the
similar-looking but different single-quote character, and quotes can
wreak havoc when the release name is processed by a shell script.
On March 16, Adam Williamson reported a bug in
the Fedora bug reporting tool: when reporting a bug against Fedora 19,
the server side threw an error when it tried to validate the name of
the release, complaining of "illegal characters
".
The root of the bug was quickly traced to libreport, which contains an is_text_file() function. The function determines whether or not a given file is text by whether 2% of the bytes are greater than 0x80. Two percent is a rather arbitrary limit, and in this case the file triggering the error was /etc/os-release, which consisted of a single line:
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger's Cat)
Dave Malcolm pointed
out that the /etc/os-release manual page says non-alphanumeric
characters should be escaped " Vlasenko did commit a more substantive patch a few days later, but
libreport was not the only utility to stumble when it
encountered the new release name. Another bug
opened by Williamson reported that grub2 also broke when it
encountered /etc/os-release, due to the un-escaped
single-quote character.
On the Fedora development list, Sérgio Basto proposed one change that would solve both
problems (and, hopefully, any others stemming from the unusual release
name): formally change the release name from "Schrödinger's
Cat" to "Schrodingers Cat" or some similar variation that stuck to
pure ASCII characters. After all, as Chris Murphy commented, there are likely to be many
more utilities that cannot handle the release name, and the project
will continue to encounter them as the development cycle progresses.
But, to others, simply changing the release name amounts to
"papering over" the real issue, which is ensuring that the build and
QA tools can handle arbitrary UTF-8 text. Surely it is better to
spend a little time now to fix the issues than to avoid them, the
thinking went. Williamson, however, disagreed, calling it " If we have to compromise on just papering it over for Alpha, I mean,
_fine_. But seriously: sometimes papering it over is just the right
thing to do.
Similarly, Chris Adams pointed out
that the deadline for adding new features for Fedora 19 had already
passed; adding UTF-8 support to a variety of tools may be important,
but there is no doubt that it amounts to a feature. But G.Wolfe
Woodbury contended that the real issue
was proper internationalization, and that " Jaroslav Reznik opened a Fedora
Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) ticket on the
subject, offering two alternatives: fixing UTF-8 and
character-handling issues as they arise, or changing the release name
to something similar but less problematic (perhaps "Cat of
Schroedinger" or The discussion on the mailing list continued, including mention of
the very real risk that after Fedora 18's lengthy delays, the prospect
of holding up Fedora 19's release to fix a character string would
amount to a terrible public relations blunder. But Peter Jones found
a compromise solution and posted a
patch changing Schrödinger's Cat to Schrödinger’s
Cat in the affected files. The two strings may not look too
different (in fact, depending on one's font, they may look identical),
but the second replaces the "typewriter apostrophe" character at
Unicode point U+0027 to the "punctuation apostrophe" at U+2019. The
typewriter apostrophe is interpreted as a shell quote character, but
the punctuation apostrophe is not. Rarely do the differences in
Unicode's byzantine slate of similar code points solve more problems
than they create—just look at curly- versus straight-quotes in
HTML, for example—but in this case, the change allowed
/etc/os-release to work once again. FESCo voted to approve
the apostrophe change and to fix any other UTF-8 support issues
encountered during the development cycle.
Of course, the apostrophe compromise leaves the potential for other
UTF-8 support issues to be encountered, and sidesteps the
quote-character issue. That bodes well for Fedora 19's release date not
getting pushed back due to a last-minute "umlaut bug," but it means less
rigorous testing on the release build tools. FESCo subsequently ruled that future release names shall not
include " In fact, some participants in the mailing list discussion proposed
adding non-alphanumeric characters to future release names just to see
what happens. Paul Flo Williams predicted someone proposing
"Motörhead's Moshpit" as the Fedora 20 release name because
of the non-ASCII characters, while Richard M. Jones suggested ☃ (the Unicode "snowman"
character U+2603, also known as HTML character entity &9731; or ☃). Peter Robinson proposed the project go right for the
goal and choose "DROP table *;".
On the other side of the debate, some developers were less than
amused. Fedora has had its share of project members who object to
release names altogether; Jóhann B. Guðmundsson said:
They also get the benefit of fixing what breaks in the process.
Anti-release-name comments did not elicit much further debate, so it seems
likely that release names will continue to cling on for at least one
more release cycle. But it is true that "Schrödinger's Cat" caused
some problems due to the unpredictable effect it has on development
and release tools. On the whole, though, the problems it revealed are
problems worth solving—there is no telling what characters
downstream spins and Fedora derivatives might put into a
string.
The distribution will be better for catching and correcting
assumptions about character encodings and non-alphanumeric strings.
Robinson noted that Fedora 19's
release name was chosen roughly six months ago during the Fedora 18
Alpha period; nevertheless it took six months for anyone to encounter
a bug related to it precisely because of how deeply buried the problem
was. A release name might be a lowly string, primarily chosen for
amusement value, but the issue should remind all distributions how
subtle such bugs can be, and Fedora clearly stands to benefit now that
the cat is out of the bag.
[Special hat tip to Don Marti for proposing
"Schrödinger's 😻" as an alternative name. "
with backslashes, following shell
style
", and Denys Vlasenko patched
is_text_file() to bump the acceptable-character threshold
from 2% to 10%. But that fix was a simple workaround; as others in
the bug comments pointed out, the function should test whether the
contents of the file are really valid UTF-8 text, which the
0x80 test does not do.
Schrödinger, Schmodinger
a question of
priorities
" in light of Fedora's human resources and release
schedule. Later, he elaborated that
fixing UTF-8 support in the problematic tools in separate branches
would be acceptable, if it did not slow down the release:
not defensively
programming for such cases is short-sighted.
"
Solutions and open questions
the proper German "Schroedinger Katze").
shell metacharacters
". That is a practical
trade-off; as several list members pointed out, by changing the
problematic string, an unknown number of character-handling bugs may
go undetected by Fedora—but they could still bite other projects
that use the Fedora tools. In the long run, the tools will still need
fixing.
If you're going to do
Unicode, do Unicode.
"]
(Log in to post comments)
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 5:52 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 8:21 UTC (Thu) by TomH (subscriber, #56149) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 15:19 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 18, 2013 15:11 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 9:33 UTC (Thu) by Jammy1986 (guest, #90237) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 11:41 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]
*cough* UTF-8 fail would give you four random accented characters from the local 8-bit encoding. That's font nonperformance.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 16:22 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
No, that'd be character set nonperformance.Font nonperformance (i.e. no local font has the glyph) would get you one box with hex digits inside.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 16:47 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 13:55 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 17:45 UTC (Thu) by hamjudo (guest, #363) [Link]
It is all a matter of fonts for me. The character is formally known as "SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES (U+1F63B)" Right now I'm using Chrome on my employer provided Windows 7 system, and I see a white box with a black border when using the default font. At home on a personal system running Chrome on Ubuntu, I saw a white cat with a black border. On my Nexus 4, the cat is black. A little googling took me to http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f63b/fontsupport.htm, which contains a link to an evil flash based Local Font List tool. Which will show which fonts (that are visible to flash in your browser (assuming you want to run flash apps at all.)) have a glyph for that character.But none of that is important. What is important is that most search engines don't index Unicode emoticons. So if I search google for "Schrödinger's 😻" I get the exact same results as just searching for "Schrödinger's", since google ignores the "😻". Unicode searches are supported, as long as the characters are in the one of the indexed classes, so a search for "这" returns billions of hits (google tells me it means "this").
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 5, 2013 9:22 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 8, 2013 15:02 UTC (Mon) by hamjudo (guest, #363) [Link]
There are a variety of Unicode regular expression libraries. Characters are in classes, alphabetic, currency symbols, numerals,uppercase, lowercase, etc... Companies running search engines will use their own rules (aka. business logic) on what they choose to index for each part of a document, possibly dependent on type of document. Some may recognize source code, and then use programming language specific rules for indexing symbols (C is case sensitive, Fortran is not).If enough people start using the cat characters in semantically significant ways, there will be a business case for entities to index those characters.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 18, 2013 15:12 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]
Best thing, it fits into 16 bit (0‥FFFD inclusive) and its UTF-8 form uses only up to three octets.
Schrödinger's box and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 15:02 UTC (Thu) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
I guess the author might not have understood the double irony in his headline :)
After having "debugged" the first email from an airline with a small airplane http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2708/index.htm as the first character of the subject already some time ago, I had a look at some Unicode tables and could easily guess what the box stands for. Really wondered how they accepted
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm ...
Lesson learned: airplane is more likely to appear in the browser's default font than kitten.
Schrödinger's box and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 11, 2013 18:01 UTC (Thu) by redden0t8 (guest, #72783) [Link]
Schrödinger's box and outside-the-box naming
Posted May 14, 2013 22:22 UTC (Tue) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]
Nate
proper German
Posted Apr 4, 2013 8:23 UTC (Thu) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]
proper German
Posted Apr 4, 2013 15:06 UTC (Thu) by hirnbrot (guest, #89469) [Link]
proper German
Posted Apr 10, 2013 8:34 UTC (Wed) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]
proper German
Posted Apr 19, 2013 14:21 UTC (Fri) by panzi (guest, #90475) [Link]
proper German
Posted May 17, 2013 14:01 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 9:20 UTC (Thu) by Comet (subscriber, #11646) [Link]
More seriously: 0x2019 is not "punctuation apostrophe", it's "RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK" and is explicitly for quoting text; the General Category property of the character is "Pf", "Final_Punctuation" as described at <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/>. It's used to end a quotation and the character's metadata constrains its interpretation to this.
An apostrophe has General Category "Po", "Other_Punctuation"; 0x27 is the correct code-point. There are a total of three Po characters called apostrophe:
0027 APOSTROPHE '
055A ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE ՚
FF07 FULLWIDTH APOSTROPHE '
The last one does not fit within a normal character cell in a monospace environment, so the sanest option is probably 0x055A, the Armenian Apostrophe.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 14:14 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 14:28 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link]
More seriously than my previous comment, though, you're correct about the name of the character in unicode, but if you consult http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NamesList.txt, it says, at various places:0027 APOSTROPHE = apostrophe-quote (1.0) ... * neutral (vertical) glyph with mixed usage * 2019 is preferred for apostrophe ... 02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE = apostrophe ... * 2019 is the preferred character for a punctuation apostrophe ... 2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK ... * this is the preferred character to use for apostrophe ...So I'm pretty sure I did the right thing here, or at least there's a good argument for it.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 23:47 UTC (Thu) by Comet (subscriber, #11646) [Link]
Unicode: consistent, until you want to rely upon the consistency.
So what's the point of marking characters as opening or closing punctuation if a machine can't rely upon well-formed text actually using that, because the distributed files themselves recommend using the characters in violation of their metadata?
*sigh*
💩
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 8, 2013 11:13 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 8, 2013 18:09 UTC (Mon) by Comet (subscriber, #11646) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 17:02 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
u1F408 is not in the basic plane; many systems don't have a character set installed which has that glyph. My Debian system apparently doesn't, and I'm a font junkie.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 17:29 UTC (Thu) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]
> set installed which has that glyph. My Debian system apparently doesn't,
> and I'm a font junkie.
Indeed, same here on Kubuntu. The "fancier" one in the title renders just fine though.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 23:40 UTC (Thu) by Comet (subscriber, #11646) [Link]
(FWIW, in Chrome I get the replacement box in the page and the 0001f63b rendered correctly in the table title, which is ironic, but in Firefox things render fine in the page itself).
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 5, 2013 19:56 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 18, 2013 15:16 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]
And I *like* fixed-misc!
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 18, 2013 15:15 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]
Not a UTF-8 issue.
Posted Apr 4, 2013 10:37 UTC (Thu) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063) [Link]
Note that even if we were stuck in the 20th century and using legacy 8-bit character sets, the file containing just "Schrödinger's Cat" would still have got the same result from the buggy is_text_file() function. This is not a UTF-8 issue.Even in ISO8859-1, the heuristic limit of 2% meant that you need a file that's 50 characters long before you're allowed even a single accented character. The only difference with UTF-8 is that you need a larger file (99 characters before you can get away with using the same accented character).
In fact, as you noted, living in the 21st century and using UTF-8 everywhere makes this a lot easier to deal with than it would have been in the past. The old crappy check for a percentage of bytes >= 0x80 can die completely, and we can just check for valid UTF-8 byte sequences. If it contains byte sequences which are *not* valid UTF-8, it's not text. (Perhaps with a tiny percentage of invalid byte sequences allowed.)
The apostrophe isn't a UTF-8 issue either; we could have had that problem even if we were sticking to pure ASCII and not even ISO8859-1. And again, UTF-8 gives us the solution, by using another visibly similar code point to replace the apostrophe.
Not a UTF-8 issue.
Posted Apr 4, 2013 14:16 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link]
Not a UTF-8 issue.
Posted Apr 5, 2013 8:26 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
Any limit other than 100% would make it impossible to name a Fedora release "żółć" ("bile").
Not a UTF-8 issue.
Posted Apr 5, 2013 20:14 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]
The chance that a binary file contains only well-formed UTF-8 is reasonably small even with fairly short files.
So what exactly is the problem?
Not a UTF-8 issue.
Posted Apr 5, 2013 20:27 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]
Furthermore, a binary file containing well-formed UTF8 is presumably harmless if printed or otherwise treated as text - at least it's no worse than a binary file that happens to contain only ascii characters.
Not a UTF-8 issue.
Posted Apr 8, 2013 8:11 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Not a UTF-8 issue.
Posted Apr 9, 2013 6:59 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
Or it could be truly international with Żółty Żółw :) (Yellow Turtle, that is).
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 13:56 UTC (Thu) by butcher (guest, #856) [Link]
Regards,
<svg
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
xmlns:sodipodi="http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/DTD/sodipodi-0.dtd"
xmlns:inkscape="http://www.inkscape.org/namespaces/inkscape"
width="130.21465"
height="152.5762"
id="svg2"
sodipodi:version="0.32"
inkscape:version="0.46"
version="1.0"
sodipodi:docname="Prince logo.svg"
inkscape:output_extension="org.inkscape.output.svg.inkscape">
<defs
id="defs4">
<inkscape:perspective
sodipodi:type="inkscape:persp3d"
inkscape:vp_x="0 : 526.18109 : 1"
inkscape:vp_y="0 : 1000 : 0"
inkscape:vp_z="744.09448 : 526.18109 : 1"
inkscape:persp3d-origin="372.04724 : 350.78739 : 1"
id="perspective10" />
<inkscape:perspective
id="perspective2390"
inkscape:persp3d-origin="372.04724 : 350.78739 : 1"
inkscape:vp_z="744.09448 : 526.18109 : 1"
inkscape:vp_y="0 : 1000 : 0"
inkscape:vp_x="0 : 526.18109 : 1"
sodipodi:type="inkscape:persp3d" />
</defs>
<sodipodi:namedview
id="base"
pagecolor="#ffffff"
bordercolor="#666666"
borderopacity="1.0"
gridtolerance="10000"
guidetolerance="10"
objecttolerance="10"
inkscape:pageopacity="0.0"
inkscape:pageshadow="2"
inkscape:zoom="3.3294838"
inkscape:cx="65.107323"
inkscape:cy="76.288101"
inkscape:document-units="px"
inkscape:current-layer="layer1"
showgrid="false"
showguides="true"
inkscape:guide-bbox="true"
inkscape:window-width="1024"
inkscape:window-height="721"
inkscape:window-x="-4"
inkscape:window-y="-4" />
<metadata
id="metadata7">
<rdf:RDF>
<cc:Work
rdf:about="">
<dc:format>image/svg+xml</dc:format>
<dc:type
rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/StillImage" />
</cc:Work>
</rdf:RDF>
</metadata>
<g
inkscape:label="Layer 1"
inkscape:groupmode="layer"
id="layer1"
transform="translate(-239.34079,-541.59448)">
<path
style="font-size:2386.33789063px;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;text-align:start;line-height:125%;text-anchor:start;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;stroke-width:1px;stroke-linecap:butt;stroke-linejoin:miter;stroke-opacity:1;font-family:Bitstream Vera Sans"
d="M 318.63315,577.65415 C 318.63315,568.27878 309.81485,562.6981 302.72495,562.6981 C 293.634,562.6981 287.45882,570.39515 287.45882,578.84242 C 287.45882,586.62374 294.34315,593.94384 302.86913,593.94384 C 311.22911,593.94384 318.63315,587.02507 318.63315,577.65415 z M 275.75746,577.80175 C 275.75746,559.13432 291.0723,551.12468 302.86913,551.12468 C 317.82345,551.12468 330.00332,562.98277 330.00332,577.67548 C 330.00332,588.61027 326.092,596.28227 318.85172,600.46637 C 326.14943,599.98119 333.653,598.98812 340.29966,596.34362 C 347.23336,593.58491 353.25889,589.08998 358.34941,584.50965 C 357.23096,590.37502 354.62493,597.86768 354.52963,605.15102 C 354.43344,612.50158 356.04046,618.56884 359.56094,624.09467 C 360.52793,625.76954 358.9016,625.58157 358.35216,624.67679 C 345.01128,607.53699 326.53505,608.81553 308.63683,608.81553 L 308.63683,629.50353 L 313.88916,629.50353 L 317.77468,625.48884 L 317.77468,643.32833 L 313.1952,639.24691 L 308.63683,639.24691 L 308.63683,664.12483 L 316.49615,658.7612 L 303.41953,685.5936 L 289.77594,658.50053 L 297.75893,664.1557 L 297.75893,639.24691 L 292.42986,639.24691 L 288.08229,643.32833 L 288.08229,625.48884 L 292.03514,629.50353 L 297.75893,629.50353 L 297.75893,608.81553 C 285.46391,608.97594 273.54901,610.93168 264.8279,614.84794 C 257.77779,618.01383 252.1776,622.44749 252.07779,628.47085 C 251.99167,633.66883 253.35849,638.19643 259.50091,638.19643 C 265.43477,638.19643 266.91838,635.35669 266.91838,633.22401 C 266.91838,631.15543 265.42157,629.25616 263.70045,628.75841 C 268.94441,636.38315 255.59774,639.5865 254.99337,631.71355 C 254.57342,626.2429 259.60132,624.87696 263.5229,624.87696 C 267.44449,624.87696 270.9351,629.13799 271.36784,633.52883 C 271.73655,637.27 268.12191,642.46613 259.71004,642.41441 C 249.37591,642.35089 246.96347,635.49952 246.96347,628.52446 C 246.96347,619.47043 254.753,612.44274 263.80934,607.78144 C 272.21812,603.45344 281.47274,601.06623 288.44715,600.69893 C 281.00867,596.62461 275.75746,588.98282 275.75746,577.80175 z"
id="text2396"
sodipodi:nodetypes="csszzcsscscscccccccccccccccccccccssszcszsssscs" />
</g>
</svg>
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 20:17 UTC (Thu) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 11, 2013 14:22 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 4, 2013 16:47 UTC (Thu) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103) [Link]
There's /etc/os-release which is an environment-like file, which contains more than a single line, has a man page, and is somewhat standardized among distros, because we require it in systemd. And there's Fedora's/Red Hat's old /etc/system-release which really just contains a single line, doesn't have a man page (in fact I am not aware of any documentation of it). Both are provided by fedora-release.rpm.
At this point /etc/system-release really should be considered legacy.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 5, 2013 2:15 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]
Also problematical might be
From
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 5, 2013 10:24 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]
Right.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 8, 2013 15:13 UTC (Mon) by jwboyer (guest, #23296) [Link]
>ago during the Fedora 18 Alpha period; nevertheless it took six months for
>anyone to encounter a bug related to it precisely because of how deeply
>buried the problem was.
Actually, the problem was discovered really quickly. The name was chosen 6 months ago, but nothing actually switched to using the name until the fedora-release package was updated. That happened when Fedora entered Branch state, and the problem was hit and reported within a day or two.
It wasn't buried deeply, it was just that there was no software using the new release name. The rawhide repo is always just 'rawhide'.
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 11, 2013 11:17 UTC (Thu) by mordae (guest, #54701) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 13, 2013 12:00 UTC (Sat) by meyert (subscriber, #32097) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 19, 2013 19:09 UTC (Fri) by rbowen (guest, #90479) [Link]
Schrödinger's 😻 and outside-the-box naming
Posted Apr 21, 2013 3:11 UTC (Sun) by chithanh (guest, #52801) [Link]
If they are less daring, they could name it aleph-0 (written as א₀ with possible fallback to ℵ₀)