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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 > > _______________________________________________ > > Python-Dev mailing list > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev > > Unsubscribe: > > http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org > > > > > > -- > --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig