Add BSD support

[woodsb02]

Would it be appropriate to add support for detecting the different families of BSD?

• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• DragonFlyBSD
• TrueOS

[sethmlarson]

I would love to see this. Do you have access to a VirtualBox or other virtualization software @woodsb02 ?

[krytarowski]

Do you mean vbox on BSD as host?

[woodsb02]

I can spin up a FreeBSD guest within my Vultr account, and give you access, if that would help with testing?
I also use the FreeBSD bhyve type 2 hypervisor at home for my own testing, but can't give external access to this.

[sethmlarson]

Well I could do the virtualization myself. :) I was just wondering if you were up to making the contribution yourself.

[nir0s]

It would be awesome to support these. I would need a contribute for that though as I don't currently have the time to invest.

Anyone? :)

[sethmlarson]

I'll try to make a dent in this!

[sethmlarson]

So I've installed and configured an OpenBSD installation and I've found that there is no /etc/*-release files and no lsb-release installed by default. It seems that the only way to get version info is via uname -rs which outputs OpenBSD 6.2. So perhaps we should try that if lsb-release isn't installed?

[krytarowski]

lsb stands for LINUX standard base.

On BSD use uname. If you really need to parse userland version, there is an option to grep for version in headers.

$ awk '/^#define/ && /__NetBSD_Version__/ {print $6}' /usr/include/sys/param.h  
8.99.7

[sethmlarson]

Thanks for the tip, I was doubtful LSB would be available but was surprised that there wasn't any release info in /etc. I think I'll go down the uname -rs route.

[woodsb02]

Note that on FreeBSD you can use the command "freebsd-version -k" to give you the same details of the kernel version. The helpful part is that if you want the userland details, you use "freebsd-version -u" (it can be different to the kernel if patches have come out for a release that only affect either kernel or userland).

[woodsb02]

Note that distro 1.2.0 has now been added to the FreeBSD ports collection, with Seth's patch in #207. If the BSD implementation changes, we can easily update the patch in the ports tree, but at least this has it working on FreeBSD :)
https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/py-distro

[krytarowski]

Why would be there /etc/*release, it's a Linux specific file. BSD are one - from the kernel to userland, and in typical scenarios uname(1) retrieves the version for everything at once.

[sethmlarson]

I was reporting information back. I've never investigated or booted into *BSD before, so I'm not sure how I would know that before investigating and learning myself.

I reported back so others don't need to verify why I made the decisions I did when reviewing my PR and to make sure that I didn't miss any better way of doing things from actual BSD experts.