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[Python-Dev] OS information, tags

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.<wink>

 > 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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