[Python-Dev] Hey! who changed sys.platform?!

[Greg Ward]

On 30 June 2000, Fred L. Drake, Jr. said:
>   Why would you need to figure this out?  Are you selecting a
> platform-specific packaging system automatically?  In that case, I'd
> search for the presence of the tools rather than asking what sort of
> distribution you're running on -- several distros use RPM, a few use
> .deb packages, etc.  When the user specifies one on the command line,
> just use the one they name and be done with it.

Currently it's up to the user to decide which kind of built distribution
they want, with stupid defaults: dumb tarball for Unix, dumb ZIP file
for Windows.  If you want an RPM or a Windows installer, you have to say 
so explicitly.  This is not a big deal, but it might be nice to detect
automatically if we can build (say) RPMs and do so.

This is not a high-priority feature, though.  I'll accept a patch if
someone out there is interested enough to implement it.

        Greg