What is $releasever

[seth vidal]

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 17:40 -0800, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> Foolish of me not to run "man yum.conf".  
> 
> So let me play this back to you:
> 
> Man yum.conf tells me to look in distroverpkg.  A short web search tells
> me that this is an rpm, whose name can be found by running:
>         yum whatprovides redhat-release
> 
> Actually running this gives the output:
>         $ yum whatprovides redhat-release
>         
>         fedora-release-10-1.noarch : Fedora release files
>         Repo        : fedora
>         Matched from:
>         Other       : redhat-release
> 
>         generic-release-9.91-2.noarch : Generic release files
>         Repo        : fedora
>         Matched from:
>         Other       : redhat-release
> 
>         generic-release-10-1.noarch : Generic release files
>         Repo        : updates
>         Matched from:
>         Other       : redhat-release
> 
>         fedora-release-10-1.noarch : Fedora release files
>         Repo        : installed
>         Matched from:
>         Other       : Provides-match: redhat-release
> 
> Since I'm running Fedora-10, the last item looks like the right one, and
> in fact:
>         $ rpm -q fedora-release-10
>         fedora-release-10-1.noarch
> What's more:
>         $ rpm -qa '*release*'
>         rpmfusion-nonfree-release-10-1.noarch
>         adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch
>         fedora-release-10-1.noarch
>         rpmfusion-free-release-10-1.noarch
>         fedora-release-notes-10.0.0-1.noarch
> doesn't show anything promising.
> 
> fedora-release-10-1.noarch contains a promising file:
>         $ cat /etc/fedora-release 
>         Fedora release 10 (Cambridge)
> So I suspect that $releasever has the value "10", and not "f10" or
> "fc10" or "Fedora-10", or whatever.
> 
> I'm sorry, but I think this is all about as clear as mud.
> 


$releasever is a yum construct you can find what it will expand to be by
running this command:

rpm -q --qf "%{version}\n" --whatprovides redhat-release

-sv