[issue38021] Modify AIX platform_tag so it provides PEP425 needs

[Michael Felt]

Michael Felt <aixtools at felt.demon.nl> added the comment:

Well, I certainly had not considered people would be using
distutils.get_platform().startswith('aix') as I have, in my limited
reading, only seen sys.platform.startswith("aix"). Likewise, do not want
to break things.

I thought this was easier to grasp than my first idea: e.g., tag[-2:] in
["32", "64"].

I'll start counting hypens, but am also curious about what is good/bad
about looking how the string ends, e.g., would there be a clear
performance difference?

Many thanks for the review!

On 12/8/2019 1:45 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> added the comment:
>
> There's a compatibility problem with changing the AIX distutils platform prefix from aix to AIX: any existing code that does "distutils.get_platform().startswith('aix')" will break. (There isn't any code in the standard library that does that, it all checks sys.platform() instead, but it's a reasonable assumption that there's going to be code in the wild that does a prefix check on the distutils API output).
>
> So I think we'll want to make the distinction between the two formats based on the number of hyphens they contain, rather than changing the prefix.
>
> I *haven't* made that change directly to the PR myself, as I want to give you a chance to consider the question first, but I do think it's a required compatibility improvement before we move ahead with this.
>
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