Home Original page

[Python-Dev] Python Language Summit at PyCon: Agenda

Jeff Hardy jdhardy at gmail.com
Tue Mar 5 06:39:12 CET 2013 
On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On 1 Mar 2013, at 18:38, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 1 Mar 2013 09:32:23 -0500
>> Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On the other hand in some ways Jython is sort of like Python on a
>>>> weird virtual OS that lets the real OS bleed through some. This may
>>>> still need to be checked in that way (there's are still checks of <if
>>>> os.name == 'nt'> right?)
>>>
>>> Yeah, but that all ooooold code ;)
>>
>> Hmm, what do you mean? `os.name == 'nt'` is still the proper way to
>> test that we're running on a Windows system (more accurately, over the
>> Windows API).
>>
>
> It has been used incorrectly in a few places in the Python standard library - Windows support code that would work correctly on IronPython is skipped because os.name is *not* 'nt' on IronPython.  That was the case in the past anyway. It's quite some time since I've used IronPython now.

I think you misremembered - there's lots of code that uses
`sys.platform == 'win32'` to detect Windows, but sys.platform is 'cli'
for IronPython. I'm pretty sure `os.name has always been 'nt' (when
running on Windows), and if not, it definitely is now.

Jython sets os.name to 'java' (IIRC), so there isn't a uniform way to
detect Windows across all implementations.

- Jeff
More information about the Python-Dev mailing list