PDA

View Full Version : Issues with release name for Kali Linux



hwittenborn
2021-09-05, 20:04
A user for a project I'm working on [1] recently found a bug where some variables that are assigned (in Bash) are invalid due to the release name of Kali Linux (that being `kali-rolling` from what was reported [2]).

Some background on the project:

The project, known as makedeb, uses Arch Linux's PKGBUILD format to create Debian packages. If you're familiar with that format, you know it's quite literally just a Bash script with some variables and functions defining how to build a package.

(The next parts require you to be familiar with the PKGBUILD format a bit, feel free to skip if otherwise)

Part of the modifications I made to the PKGBUILD format include distribution-specific variables [3] for things like `depends` so package maintainers can set different dependencies on different distributions (i.e. you could set `groovy_depends` and `focal_depends` for Ubuntu 20.10 and 20.04 respectively).

This system was working fine, except for when the original bug came up, which outlines that you can't assign variable names with a hyphen.

---

That gets to my main point with this; I know I'm really pulling a stretch for something that could be argued I need to implement myself, but I'd really prefer it if Kali Linux's release name could be changed to something like `kali` or `kali_rolling`.

As far as I'm aware, no other distributions use hyphens in their distribution name (or are even mutli-worded for the matter), and it would really make it simpler on my part if there wasn't any reason to avoid changing it.

Assuming we didn't go with that approach, it wouldn't even be very hard to implement, I really just want to avoid getting "hacky" with stuff where possible.

Any thoughts?

[1]: https://github.com/makedeb/makedeb
[2]: https://github.com/makedeb/makedeb/issues/31
[3]: https://docs.hunterwittenborn.com/makedeb/makedeb/additional-pkgbuild-specs/distribution-specific-relationships