On Mon, 2 Mar 2009, Chris Dolan wrote:
On Mar 2, 2009, at 12:04 AM, Timothy S. Nelson wrote:
Hi. I note that we have $?OS, $?VM, and $?DISTRO (and their $*
counterparts). I'd like to recommend that we eliminate $?OS, and replace
it with $?KERNEL (ie. Linux) and maybe $?ARCH (ie. i386). Thoughts?
I disagree.
User-space code cares much more deeply about the operating system than the
kernel, largely thanks to libc or the equivalent. For example, BSD systems
can be built on a number of different kernels. Mac OS X is in principle
FreeBSD on Mach, but there are a huge number differences from "plain" FreeBSD
that have nothing to do with Mach. Instead, it would be even more useful to
represent $?OS.family, $?OS.version.major, $?OS.version.minor, etc. Linux
distros often support switching kernel versions out from under the OS.
So how about we define things as follows for Mac:
- Kernel = FreeBSD
- Arch = Mach
- Distro = Mac OS X
Would that work for you?
I agree we need versioning. My plan would be that each of these
variables contain a name and a version, at the least. I also may not have
been clear on the fact that I wanted to retain Distro.
Anyway, does this help some?
:)
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| Name: Tim Nelson | Because the Creator is, |
| E-mail: wayl...@wayland.id.au | I am |
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