Great idea! Sounds like a PEP (informational, probably) would be good idea.
On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Bill Janssen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I don't think this is bike-shedding.
>
> The debate about "AMD64" vs. "amd64" vs. "x86_64" reminded me that
> I've been bit more and more frequently by bits of platform-specific
> knowledge scattered around the standard library. The latest is the
> code in distutils.unixccompiler that tries to figure out what flags to
> send to the linker in order to add a dynamic library path lookup to a
> shared library.
>
> There are lots of different ways of figuring out which platform is
> being used, and they're all over the place. The code in
> distutils.unixccompiler uses "sys.platform[:6]", and looks for
> "darwin"; the code in urllib.py uses "os.name", and expects it to be
> "mac", but later looks for "sys.platform == 'darwin'; posixfile
> believes that platforms come with version numbers ("linux2", "aix4");
> pydoc and tarfile have tests for "sys.platform == 'mac'". tempfile
> looks at os.sys.platform *and* os.name.
>
> Could well be that all of these are correct (I believe that "mac", for
> instance, refers to the generations of the Mac OS before OS X). But
> it means that when someone tries to update "Python" to a new major
> version release for, say, OS X, it's really easy to miss things. And
> the fact that the platform version is sometimes included and sometimes
> not is also problematic; darwin9 is different from darwin8 in some
> important aspects.
>
> It would be nice to
>
> (a) come up with a list of standard platform symbols,
> (b) put those symbols somewhere in the documentation,
> (c) have one way of discovering them, via sys or os or platform or
> whichever module,
> (d) add a standard way of discovering the platform version, and
> (e) stamp out all the other ways that have crept in over the years.
>
> Bill
> _______________________________________________
> Python-Dev mailing list
> Python-Dev@python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
> Unsubscribe:
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org
>
--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
