How to make Fastfetch correctly identifying DietPi

[CTRL-panino]

Hello!
When running Fastfetch on DietPi, the distro name displayed is not DietPi.
As discussed in greater detail in this issue, Fastfetch recognises the OS as Debian (which is somewhat correct) or Raspberry Pi OS (which is incorrect).
The Fastfetch maintainer is available to help solve the issue, but I haven't been able to provide him with helpful information.
Therefore, I would like to ask if there's something specific that Fastfetch could check to determine that the OS is DietPi (and possibly even the version).
Thank you for your help.

[Joulinar]

DietPi is not an operating system in itself. It is a collection of bash scripts on top of a Debian base image. Therefore the indication for Debian is completely correct. To recognize whether it is a DietPi system, you would have to look at the presence of special files. Here you can take /boot/dietpi/.version for example. The file also contains the necessary version information.

[CTRL-panino]

Hi @Joulinar,
Thank you for providing these information :)

[MichaIng]

Surprising that 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is not identified as Debian, actually, since it is Debian as well. 32-bit one is Raspbian, but 64-bit one is Debian + some own packages, most importantly kernel/firmware. Guess it depends on what you want to know, or what fastfetch is aiming to show.

IMO, in relevant generic distro identification files, like /etc/os-release, the main APT package repository should be represented, i.e. Debian or Raspbian, not each individual OS image based on those main distros. Reason is that this file is used by a lot of tools, scripts, installers etc to know which packages are (supposed to be) available, which toolchains, and their respective versions. It would be a nightmare if e.g. Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, DietPi and alike started to write their own names to base variables in these files, as mentioned tools/scripts would then not be able to identify the main distro anymore, failing or doing false decisions, causing their maintainers headache, theoretically need to maintain a list of dozens/hundreds of distro names/IDs.

However, this script obviously is for end user information, not for scripted information, so probably it has some own logic to identify Raspberry Pi OS, and their own choice to maintain this detection. Not sure whether it is worth to ask them detecting DietPi as well with some non-generic method. Now /boot/dietpi content is a way to detect it, but I actually aim to move these files out of there, into generic /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc paths, which would then break this detection. And neither do I want to cause other's headache to update their stuff whenever DietPi changes, nor do I want to be bound to how things work now or backwards-compatibility only to prevent others headache. I guess you know that you are using a DietPi system, otherwise the login banner tells you prominently 😅, and even for you/DietPi users it is good to know they are actually running Debian under the hood. At least my impression is that the latter is more often forgotten than the first 😉.

[CTRL-panino]

Hi @MichaIng, thank you for your answer.

what fastfetch is aiming to show

As far as I understand (I'm not the Fastfetch maintainer), the OS module tries to display the specific distro name by default. However, other OS information can be customised using the Fastfetch custom format, such as including the main APT package repository (as I did in this example):

I actually aim to move these files out of there, into generic /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc paths

Thank you for pointing this out, I'll inform the Fastfetch maintainer about it.
If you would like to discuss this directly or provide more in-depth information, you can join the issue I linked earlier.