[nailer]

> It's an optional package in many distributions

If only Linux packaging system had some kind of dependency system. That way systemd and other LSB needing packages could require lsb. You could even have some kind of automated packaging tool, or perhaps modify yellowdog updater, to fetch those dependencies automatically.

[devicenull]

Attempting to install redhat-lsb on CentOS 6 drags in:

  alsa
  cups
  ghostscript
  gstreamer
  pixman
  qt
  fonts
  poppler
  and more (102 packages in total!)

Now, this is on a server, so I have no use for audio, printing, streaming, pdf creation, nor any sort of GUI components. Do you really think it's reasonable that all that needs to be installed just to tell me what version of the operating system is running?

[nailer]

> Do you really think it's reasonable that all that needs to be installed just to tell me what version of the operating system is running?

(assuming redhat-lsb is the package that owns $(which lsb_release) )

No. Red Hat should fix that.