[Zooko]
> I just read back through this ticket, but I didn't understand exactly
> what MAL wanted to have different from what this Python function
> currently does:

It may be this:

> It's better to follow the approach taken by lsb_release and then
> add calling lsb_release as one of the methods taken by
> _dist_try_harder() (using platform.popen()) should the parsers
> fail.
> This avoids spawning a process in most cases.