I wove what I was doing on this RT into what I was doing in http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=47902 and have submitted the results in a patch attached to that ticket: http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Attachment/324326/144446/diff.noConfig.patch.txt
I did not implement a command-line option for 'osname' because (a) I don't think we need it quite yet and (b) when we do implement it, it will probably be in a configuration step of its own. In other respects, I tried to follow the intent of Aldo's original submission. Once committed, we will take a reading on $^O in the second configuration step, init::defaults, place it in a part of the Parrot::Configure object where we store other readings from the Perl environment, and then look up that value at points in later configuration steps where we have taken a direct reading on $^O. kid51
