On Sep 21, 2005, at 11:26 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
The platform module has a way to map system names such as returned by uname() to marketing names. It maps SunOS to Solaris, for example. But it doesn't map Darwin to Mac OS X. I think I know how to map Darwin version numbers to OS X version numbers: from http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ it is clear that OS X 10.a.b corresponds to Darwin (a+4).b, except for OS X versions <= 10.1. I'd be happy to write the code and add it to system_alias() in platform.py. Is this a good idea?
No, it's not. There are other mismatches between Mac OS X version and Darwin kernel version (e.g. 10.3.0 and 10.3.1 used the same kernel version). The only correct way to do it with public API is to use gestalt, which platform.mac_ver() does. There are other ways (reading a plist, parsing the output of /usr/bin/sw_vers, using the same SPI that /usr/bin/sw_vers uses...), but gestalt is the only public API. The one caveat with platform.mac_ver() is that it was broken for some version(s) of Python. I don't remember when that was fixed. It definitely works for Python 2.3.5 (ships with Mac OS X 10.4) and Python 2.4.1, but I'm relatively certain it was broken with the Python 2.3.0 that shipped with Mac OS X 10.3, and perhaps also the Python 2.2.0 that shipped with Mac OS X 10.2. Anyway, this information isn't in the uname. You can guess with the uname, but it requires lots of special cases and maintenance. -bob