On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 10:41 PM, Eric Snow
In October 2009 there was a short flurry of interest in adding "sys.implementation" as an object to encapsulate some implementation-specific information [1]. Does anyone recollect where this proposal went? Would anyone object to reviving it (or a variant)?
The premise is that sys.implementation would be a "namedtuple" (like sys.version_info). It would contain (as much as is practical) the information that is specific to a particular implementation of Python. "Required" attributes of sys.implementation would be those that the standard library makes use of. For instance, importlib would make use of sys.implementation.name (or sys.implementation.cache_tag) if there were one. The thread from 2009 covered a lot of this ground already. [1] Here are the "required" attributes of sys.implementation that I advocate: * name (mixed case; sys.implementation.name.lower() used as an identifier) * version (of the implementation, not of the targeted language version; structured like sys.version_info?) Here are other variables that _could_ go in sys.implementation: * cache_tag (e.g. 'cpython33' for CPython 3.3) * repository * repository_revision * build_toolchain * url (or website) * site_prefix * runtime Let's start with a minimum set of expected attributes, which would have an immediate purpose in the stdlib. However, let's not disallow implementations from adding whatever other attributes are meaningful for them. -eric [1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-October/092893.html