
Guido van Rossum wrote:
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.
platform.py does use the available functions on a couple of platforms... and it itself provides direct enquiry functions for Python programs to use. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you here. Anyway, it's there for non-core programs to use and so far I think the core lib has managed to switch on sys.platform and do the right thing, so platform.py may not be all that necessary in the core. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/