... turns out that aside from the conditionals pointed out in "https://serverfault.com/q/283330/71790", there is something like a symbolic/alias name for the above. Guessing a little, a web search turned up centos-release
and of course redhat-release
as the package names used on the other two related distros.
Since it took me some time to come up with the solution and sharing is caring, I decided to write down what I found for the next internaut doing a web search.
So, next I ran yum install redhat-release
in order to install it, hoping it would be available. It was:
$ sudo yum install redhat-release
Setting up Install Process
Package sl-release-6.1-2.x86_64 already installed and latest version
Nothing to do
Apparently the name redhat-release
somehow magically translates to sl-release
. I.e. it's an alias.
Conclusion
You can use the generic name redhat-release
, even on the two derived distros CentOS and Scientific Linux to refer to the respective distribution-specific packages centos-release
and sl-release
. So:
Require: redhat-release >= 6.1
does the job on all of them.
On a related note, I knew that all of them have a file /etc/redhat-release
and yum whatprovides /etc/redhat-release
gave me:
$ yum whatprovides /etc/redhat-release
sl-release-6.1-2.x86_64 : Scientific Linux release file
Repo : local
Matched from:
Filename : /etc/redhat-release
sl-release-6.1-2.x86_64 : Scientific Linux release file
Repo : installed
Matched from:
Other : Provides-match: /etc/redhat-release