However, I dislike the frequent usage of platform in setup.py, where this patch adds another instance of. I believe the autoconf approach "test for features, not system names" is much more flexible. If the curses module requires certain feature, find a way of testing whether the features are present, and only compile _curses if they are. Then it would not be necessary to check whether the system name is "darwin1". This is problematic in particular as different spellings of the platform are expected: It is "darwin1" in some places, and "Darwin1.2" atleast in another place.
Does distutils have a way to grep a .h file for a certain string? I'm sure that we could come up with a suitable string to check for (a function or macro defined in recent curses versions but not in old curses versions); but I'd hate to have to write the test by hand. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)