[Python-ideas] bdist naming scheme (compatibility tags) PEP

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Daniel Holth wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 8:39 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> Daniel Holth wrote:
>>>>> Platform Tag
>>>>> ------------
>>>>>
>>>>> The platform tag is simply `distutils.util.get_platform()` with all
>>>>> hyphens `-` and periods `.` replaced with underscore `_`.
>>>>
>>>> This part is going to cause problems. distutils is good at identifying
>>>> Linux and Windows and giving them sensible platform names, but it
>>>> doesn't do a good job for other OSes.
>>>
>>> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0425/
>>
>> I still don't think that referencing the distutils function
>> in the PEP is a good idea :-) It would be better to create
>> a new helper.
> 
> How about just sysconfig.get_platform()?

That's essentially the same function :-) For some reason it's a copy
of the one in distutils.util. I guess an oversight when sysconfig
was created from various parts of distutils.

Both functions are not suitable for the intended purpose, namely
providing enough information to detect binary compatibility.

Given that such information changes more often than we do Python
releases and that this information is domain specific, I think it's
better to maintain a pair of functions for creating such a platform
string and detecting binary compatibility in a separate PyPI module
which can then be pulled in by packaging and installer tools.

The right place for the logic would be the platform module
which was created in much the same way. Like with the above
module, it was crowd-sourced to integrate domain specific
knowledge. We added it to the stdlib after it stabilized.
This is both good and bad. The good part is that it comes
with Python automatically, the bad part that 3rd party code
relying on it now has to deal with several different versions
(for each Python release) and that platform changes are difficult
to get into the module.

This is why I think the PEP should just reference such a new
module and leave the string format and binary compatibility
check details to the module, rather than spell it out in the
PEP.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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