[Python-Dev] platform management

[Bill Janssen]

Looking at http://docs.python.org/lib/module-os.html, I find the following:

  name
  
    The name of the operating system dependent module imported. The
    following names have currently been registered: 'posix', 'nt', 'mac',
    'os2', 'ce', 'java', 'riscos'.

This implies that there's a registry somewhere?

Bill

> 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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> 
> 
> 
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> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)