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

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 3:45 AM, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>> No, the architecture is given by platform.machine() so you have it already,
>> by combining a test with sys.platform.
>
> But platform.machine() returns a 32 bits machine if you run 32 bits
> python on 64 bits windows. AFAIK, the only reliable way is to use the
> win32 API:
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/02/01/364563.aspx
>
> In scons (where we limit ourself to pure python code ATM), we tried the
> registry, but this is not reliable (some braindead softwares install
> WoW64 registry keys even on 32 bits windows). OTOH, I guess not that
> many applications need this information: after all, the whole point of
> WoW64 is to virtualize 32 bits applications so that they believe to run
> on a conventional 32 bits python.

There's something unclear for me here :

What is suppose to happen when you use Python 32bits on a 64bits machine,
for Python distributions that get build or installed ?

Do you end up in a mixed environment of 64bits distributions within a
32bits interpreter ?