lsb_release should show history of release upgrades

[Peter Matulis]

Binary package hint: lsb

Currently (Lucid), lsb_release only shows information about current system status. It would be nice (wishlist) if we could keep track of the last fresh install and all intervening release upgrades.

Current output to lsb_release -a (omitting ugly LSB Version output):

---------------------------------------------------
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Release: 10.04
Codename: lucid
---------------------------------------------------

Suggested output:

---------------------------------------------------
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Release history: jaunty, karmic-dev, karmic, lucid-dev, lucid
Description: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
Release: 10.04
Codename: lucid
---------------------------------------------------

Not sure if we can break 'release-dev' into parts:

release-alpha1
release-beta

and so on.

Also not sure if this can create confusion if users upgrade manually (editing sources.list and then 'apt-get dist-upgrade').

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'm not sure how useful this would actually be. In practice, to diagnose bugs that depend on details of upgrade ordering, you generally need /var/log/dpkg.log and/or /var/log/apt/term.log instead; a summary like this would not be very useful for that, and I can't think of any other uses for it.

[Peter Matulis (petermatulis)]

This can be very useful in a technical support context where the history of a machine is very valuable even if there are no corresponding logs.

[Didier Raboud (odyx)]

I don't think it's lsb_release's job to provide that type of information. lsb_release is supposed to be a distro-agnostic interface to query what Linux distribution a program is on, not a distro-specific history-grabbing tool.

Actually, I think it would be easier for another non-lsb_release (probably distro-specific) tool to do the job.

[Peter Matulis (petermatulis)]

I don't mind what tool does the job. It would simply be very useful to be able to quickly determine the upgrade history of an installation.