There are Linux distros that have inconsistent information in the data sources that ld uses.

For example , see issue #78 about Linux Mint. In that case, the precedence implemented by ld causes Linux Mint to be shown as an Ubuntu. While it is fairly compatible to Ubuntu, it is not Ubuntu. It has its own name, id, version (Linux Mint 17.3 is based upon Ubuntu 14.04), and code name ("rose" for Linux Mint 17).

I think that instead of asking the distros to become consistent, that calls for some mechanism in ld to deal with that.

We already parse all three data sources if available, and we could find out that the (normalized) IDs are different, and if so, trigger some special-case processing. In the case of Linux Mint, the special processing would be to ignore those data sources that advertise Ubuntu.

I guess the trick is to implement this without getting into endless if-elif-else statements.