Switch from IMG_VERSION to lsb() functions?

[bastelfreak]

Distributions sucks, they switch their behaviour from time to time so we need a few switches in our distribution.sh, for example if somebody installs a Debian 7 or 8. We currently determine this by parsing the version number from the image file, for example:

Ubuntu-1204-precise-32-minimal.tar.gz

this is easy because we specify the format of the image, unfortunately we can write whatever we want into the filename and this may or may not match the content in the file. Another solution would be to run lsb*() methods in the chroot to determine the correct version. But this results in another dependency. Do we really want this? Are there any other benefits?

[asciiprod]

you cannot do this, because you need to know which distro it is before extracting the image file. See overrides for CoreOS to use dd instead of tar