June 30, 2000
11:14 p.m.
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/)