Please prefer file_release over lsb_release

[davidkna]

Many distributions don't seem to distribute lsb_release binaries by default, and reading a file should be faster than executing an external binary. In addition, file_release works better in some situations: lsb_release detects Fedora WSL remix as Linux, whereas file_release picks up Fedora. Now that file_release hopefully works reliably, is lsb_release needed at all?

[martintc]

Will investigate this. Linux has been a little tricky and I have not sit down to solve some of the issues. But yea, relying on lsb_release is an issue because if someone doesn't have that package installed on their distro (and as you mentioned, many don't distribute in their 'base'), it leads to garbage results. If we can cut down our external dependencies that we can't control through cargo, it should be avoided at all cost. That is at least my view.

Which is really an issue as os_info is a library and from what I've seen using os_info as a library in comtrya, it can be hard to tease out the issue on a platform is lack of lsb_release as a source of a bug in a caller on os_info.

[stanislav-tkach]

@martintc

if someone doesn't have that package installed on their distro (and as you mentioned, many don't distribute in their 'base'), it leads to garbage results

There should be no garbage results, because in that case the library falls back to using the release file.

@davidkna
That makes sense, though I prefer conservatively not remove the lsb_release usage, at least not immediately. Changing the priority should be fine, though.