Not that I hope to override the heavy -1, but I don't agree
with the second
point. It embodies a huge amount of knowledge that is needed to write portable code. As such, IMO, it _does_ belong in the standard
library. How
is it different in its nature from sys.platform, which is only
a much weaker
version of the same concept?
A more subtle way of stating my opinion could be: if we were to do something in the standard distribution about the problems that this is addressing, I think we would do it in a much more direct fashion, e.g. by making the appropriate enquiry functions directly accessible.
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
I much prefer that answer, as it leaves the door open to a patch. I don't care about the implementation, just the feature. Thanks.
--david