On 08/13/2011 11:16 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Saturday, August 13, 2011 14:49:13 Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Sat, 13 Aug 2011 14:23:35 +0300, Jonathan M Davis<[email protected]>
wrote:
It does on at least some distros.
TIL...
Except that you need useful, understandable version numbers to make
sense. 2.6
and 3.0 are virtually meaningless on Linux (which would be the major and
minor
number). Maybe the minor number will mean something with the 3 series,
but
we've had 2.6 for years now, and there's an enormous difference between
2.6.3
and 2.6.33.
Perhaps make the version number a dynamic array?
Even worse, major and minor numbers don't mean _anything_ on Windows.
What are
you going to give? The NT kernel version?
By the way, the Windows versions in the OS enum are very incomplete - only
major client versions are listed.
A rather large variety of Windows versions and editions exists, see for
example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724429(v=vs.85).aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions
Considering the large variety, I think it would be a mistake to try to
keep track of all Windows versions in an enum. I would like to suggest to
replace all Windows versions in the OS enum with a single "Windows"
entity, and add some constants or enums for common Windows versions to
allow comparisons. For example:
if (os_major> OS_MAJOR_WINDOWS_XP ||
(os_major == OS_MAJOR_WINDOWS_XP&& os_minor>= OS_MINOR_WINDOWS_XP))
{
// This is Windows XP or higher
}
Going even further, a version structure supporting comparison operators
would make the above simpler. (Or are regular dynamic arrays suitable for
this?)
There are a large variety of Linux distros as well, and we can't cover all of
them, so I'm not sure that the fact that there are lots of stray versions of
Windows depending on how you count them merits handling Windows like that.
However, it _is_ a bit odd to treat each version of Windows as a separate OS
in the enum when none of the other OSes have more than one version in the
list.
That's why you let the community keep the enum up to date. Offer support
for the major distros (My list would include RedHat, Debian, SuSE, and
their derivatives (Fedora, Ubuntu, openSuSE). Once you have those 6
(that's not a big number), it's not hard to let the community add their
favorite distro (like Arch).
As for doing something like you suggest with the os_major and os_minor
numbers, it does seem kind of messy. If all you want is comparison, you can do
that with the existing enum, and it covers all of the Windows versions that
most people will care about.
The situation definitely requires some consideration though. And it should
probably be redesigned a bit.
- Jonathan M Davis
