[Distutils] [RFC] PEP 345 and PEP 386 updates

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 9:33 PM, David Lyon <david.lyon at preisshare.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:36:08 -0400, Fred Drake <fdrake at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If we adopt such a micro-language (I'm reserving judgment until I've
>> had more time to read the relevant PEPs carefully), I'd rather see the
>> names match what's in the Python runtime more closely, probably only
>> avoiding the call syntax.
>> ..
>>   requires: pywin32; if sys.platform == 'win32'
>> ..
>
> I foresee problems with using constants from the python runtime as
> they currently stand. Only for the simple reason that the existing
> 'constants' were good 5 years ago. But won't be good - next year.
>
> For example, 'win32' refers to a specific windows because windows
> can now be 64 bit.
>
> Does win32 mean win64? It does now - but it shouldn't.
>
> I propose windows and 32 and 64 as further qualifiers. So for example,
> 'windows' or 'windows-32' or 'windows-64'. Not to mention 'windows-xp-32'
> and 'windows-xp-64' and 'windows-ce'.
>
> Maybe windows-128 is around the corner - who knows..
>
> I respect those sys python constants.. but they are too unspecific
> to be used here.

No, the architecture is given by platform.machine() so you have it already,
by combining a test with sys.platform.


>
> And for linux, what is 'linux2' ? It should just be linux.. to
> make it less confusing.

That's how the platform is called, that's not created by Python (it's
what uname -s returns)

see http://docs.python.org/library/sys.html

Tarek.