[Python-Dev] Where is our official policy of what platforms we do support?

[Cameron Simpson]

On 14May2014 14:45, Brett Cannon <bcannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Wed May 14 2014 at 10:43:18 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>
>wrote:
>> On Wed, 14 May 2014 14:20:26 +0000
>> Brett Cannon <bcannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Over the past week or so there have been 2 patches to add support for
>> > various UNIX OSs. Now I thought we had stopped trying to add new esoteric
>> > OSs (e.g. I had never heard of MirOS until the patch for it came in),
>> but I
>> > can't find a PEP that spells out what it takes to get a platform
>> supported (
>> > http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0011/ is about removing platforms,
>> > not keeping them or adding them unless you are re-adding one which
>> > apparently just takes a volunteer).
>>
>> OTOH you can fix a platform bug without officially supporting it. If
>> someone files an OpenBSD-specific patch, it may make sense to commit it
>> even without officially supporting OpenBSD. In practice it all depends
>> on how intrusive / reasonable the patch is, and whether it is working
>> around a platform-specific bug rather than a standards-compliant
>> limitation.
>>
>> (we could call those "stochastically supported platforms" :-))
>
>Very true, but these patches are all for e.g. configure to recognize a
>specific platform by listing them in some constant. Changing code to be
>more general I have no issue with since that's just good practice.

Recognition of a special platform isn't "full support", just addition of 
recognition making possible partial support for special cases. Unless that 
makes for some horrendous recognition decision tree somewhere I would have 
thought that's a pretty low bar to accept, and worth doing.

Leaving aside any bug actually fixed, it makes it much easier for someone else 
to fix a platform specific bug by making a test constant available for turning 
on whatever special mode/code is wanted.

More context on the example patch that triggered this query?

Just 2c,
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>