Issue 799369: documentation for sys.platform is unclear (original) (raw)

Issue799369

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This issue has been migrated to GitHub: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/39176

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process

Created on 2003-09-02 20:16 by vimboss, last changed 2022-04-10 16:10 by admin. This issue is now closed.

Messages (4)
msg60377 - (view)	Author: Bram Moolenaar (vimboss)	Date: 2003-09-02 20:16
The use of sys.platform is very risky, because it is not at all clear what the possible values are. For example, on Mac OS X "darwin" is used, but this can only be discovered by trying it out and asking Jack when another value will be used. Another problem is that the examples given include a number, which suggests that an OS version number might be included here. Is that only a major version number? And why doesn't Mac OS X report "macosx10.2"? Suggestion: Add a list of known values and for what platforms they are used.
msg60378 - (view)	Author: Jack Jansen (jackjansen) *	Date: 2003-09-05 13:45
Logged In: YES user_id=45365 A first step would be to document that for Unix the value is based on the information returned by "uname" *at the time of building Python*, mapped to lowercase and with some cruft removed. For other platforms for which the value is known (Windows, MacOS9) we could document the actual values.
msg60379 - (view)	Author: Brett Cannon (brett.cannon) *	Date: 2003-09-06 21:23
Logged In: YES user_id=357491 How often are new platforms supported? From my short time on python-dev I would say not very often. So listing all known platforms shouldn't suffer *too* much from bit rot, but it is something to consider before going forward with this.
msg61285 - (view)	Author: Georg Brandl (georg.brandl) *	Date: 2008-01-20 12:57
Implemented the suggestions in r60136.