[Distutils] Platform naming standardization

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 13 Jan, 2010, at 18:41, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>> 
>> On Wednesday, January 13, 2010, at 04:15PM, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>> 2) On OS X, the modification to the value returned by
>>>> pkg_resources.get_platform() isn't correct for fat version of Python
>>>> 2.5, as detailed in setuptools issue 19.  To solve that, we're using the
>>>> patch I submitted to the issue (with a couple recent changes).
>>> 
>>> I think that using "fat" in the version string is wrong for
>>> Mac OS X, since there are many ways to build fat binaries.
>>> 
>>> Instead, the version string should include the details of
>>> all included builds, ie. 'x86', 'x64', 'ppc', 'ppc64'.
>> 
>> Maybe in the long run, but for now "fat" has a well-defined meaning for distutils: fat == ppc + x86_64. There is also a number of other variants, as described in the documentation for distutils.
> 
> I think you meant: fat == ppc + i386.

Thats right.
> 
> However, it's also possible to build binaries with ppc, i386 and
> x86_64 - as are shipped with Mac OS X 10.6, so "fat" is not really
> well-defined and could lead to trying to install 32-bit software for
> a 64-bit build of Python.

"fat" is well-defined for distutils, see the definition of get_platform at <http://docs.python.org/distutils/apiref.html>. 

For distutils "fat" is always a universal binary with architectures i386 and ppc, with alternate names for other variants.

> 
> IMHO, it's better to list the actually supported architectures
> as e.g. "darwin-i386-ppc" or "darwin-i386-ppc-x86_64".

That is not how distutils currently works. I also object to "darwin" as a prefix, the platform is named "macosx". Darwin is the opensource unix variant used in OSX and that name shouldn't be interchangeably with macosx.  I'm also unhappy that sys.platform is "darwin" on OSX, but it's probably too late to change that.

Ronald
> 
> -- 
> Marc-Andre Lemburg
> eGenix.com
> 
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