[Python-Dev] OS information, tags (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Apr 13 16:04:26 CEST 2010

Nick Coghlan writes:

they're available? Or even a separate OS field with "Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, *BSD, Other" as the options?

XEmacs has a multilink field "platform". The default is "Any or all" (mislabeled N/A), and values include hardware (currently x86, PPC, other), OS (POSIX, Windows NT), and GUI (Windows, X11, Carbon, TTY[sic]). Multilink means you can have as many as you want, and no attempt is made to enforce "one of each" or anything like that.

I don't know if the distinction between OS and GUI is as important for Python. And "platform" is rarely useful for us -- platform bugs tend to be spectacular things like build breakage or crashes, and so get attention from a much wider circle than just the platform specialists. (Especially since the guilty party is usually a nonspecialist who never heard of that kind of dragon before.) So I can't really offer a pile of relevant experience, but it seems like a good idea.

While there is some Windows and Mac specific code, treating them as separate components seems fairly unintuitive.

Not always unintuitive. There are some features only available on a particular platform, then "component" sort of makes sense. OTOH, there are some bugs that are only available on a particular platform even though the code is generic. There "component" isn't very intuitive. In theory, I could see having both the component and the platform fields, but probably that would require too much user education to be worth it.

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