[Distutils] [Python-Dev] platform management

[Guido van Rossum]

Great idea! Sounds like a PEP (informational, probably) would be good idea.

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:
> I don't think this is bike-shedding.
>
>  The debate about "AMD64" vs. "amd64" vs. "x86_64" reminded me that
>  I've been bit more and more frequently by bits of platform-specific
>  knowledge scattered around the standard library.  The latest is the
>  code in distutils.unixccompiler that tries to figure out what flags to
>  send to the linker in order to add a dynamic library path lookup to a
>  shared library.
>
>  There are lots of different ways of figuring out which platform is
>  being used, and they're all over the place.  The code in
>  distutils.unixccompiler uses "sys.platform[:6]", and looks for
>  "darwin"; the code in urllib.py uses "os.name", and expects it to be
>  "mac", but later looks for "sys.platform == 'darwin'; posixfile
>  believes that platforms come with version numbers ("linux2", "aix4");
>  pydoc and tarfile have tests for "sys.platform == 'mac'".  tempfile
>  looks at os.sys.platform *and* os.name.
>
>  Could well be that all of these are correct (I believe that "mac", for
>  instance, refers to the generations of the Mac OS before OS X).  But
>  it means that when someone tries to update "Python" to a new major
>  version release for, say, OS X, it's really easy to miss things.  And
>  the fact that the platform version is sometimes included and sometimes
>  not is also problematic; darwin9 is different from darwin8 in some
>  important aspects.
>
>  It would be nice to
>
>   (a) come up with a list of standard platform symbols,
>   (b) put those symbols somewhere in the documentation,
>   (c) have one way of discovering them, via sys or os or platform or
>       whichever module,
>   (d) add a standard way of discovering the platform version, and
>   (e) stamp out all the other ways that have crept in over the years.
>
>  Bill
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)