On 15 October 2016 at 03:52, Sebastian Krause <sebast...@realpath.org> wrote: > Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: >> The compiler information generally reveals the OS as well (if only >> accidentally), and the OS is often useful information. > > But in which situation would you really need to call Python from > outside to find out which OS you're on?
Folks don't always realise that the nominal version reported by redistributors isn't necessarily exactly the same as the upstream release bearing that version number. This discrepancy is most obvious with LTS Linux releases that don't automatically rebase their supported Python builds to new maintenance releases, and instead selectively backport changes that they or their customers need. This means that it isn't always sufficient to know that someone is running "Python on CentOS 6" (for example) - we sometimes need to know which *build* of Python they're running, as if a problem can't be reproduced with a recent from-source upstream build, it may be due to redistributor specific patches, or it may just be that there's an already implemented fix upstream that the redistributor hasn' t backported yet. So +1 from me for making "python -vV" a shorthand for "python -c 'import sys; print(sys.version)'". Since older versions won't support it, it won't help much in the near term (except as a reminder to ask for "sys.version" in cases where it may be relevant), but it should become a useful support helper given sufficient time. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
