Comment 11 for bug 739693

>>> First: How does one reliably detect this version of Ubuntu? (Assume I
>>> have never used Ubuntu, and don't have access to it for testing.)

>>look in '/etc/issue' should be good.

> What, precisely, do I look for? I want to write a shell test to add in these extra
> paths on this version (and future versions) of Ubuntu, but not add in these
> extra paths otherwise.

I would specifically advise against checking the platform, and instead do something vendor-neutral like the gcc -print-search-dirs check above. That way anything you implement will also work for other vendors who adopt multiarch.

If you *must* check the platform, $(lsb_release -is) is a better check, but lsb_release is not included by default on Debian systems and this issue is going to turn up on Debian too soon enough.