[Python-Dev] Is distutils.util.get_platform() the "current" or the "target" platform

[Steve Dower]

On 14Feb2019 1147, Gregory P. Smith wrote:
> To alleviate confusion long term I'd love it if we could deprecate the 
> unqualified get_platform() API and point people towards always being 
> explicit about get_target_platform() vs get_current_platform().

This is an option too, though it doesn't reduce the code churn. I 
personally want to consider distutils deprecated as a whole anyway, and 
only maintained for the sake of our core needs.

> There are valid reasons for people to be expecting either target or 
> current return values from get_platform(), but I agree with you, having 
> it return the target platform /feels/ more likely to be what people 
> want.  It'd be worth auditing a random sample of people's calls of this 
> API in open source projects to confirm that intuition.

I took a random sample of about 50 uses from GitHub and 100% of them 
were copies of our distutils/tests/test_util.py (not even kidding: 
https://github.com/search?q=distutils+get_platform&type=Code)

If you go far enough down the results, they're all copies of wheel's (or 
pip's) pep425tags.py, which import distutils.util but don't seem to use 
get_platform

I'm inclined to say that nobody but us uses this API :) Does that make 
it seem more okay to "clarify" that it's returning target platform?

Cheers,
Steve