In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:37:59 -0800 (PST) Devraj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Hi everyone, > > > > My Python program needs reliably detect which Operating System its > > being run on, infact it even needs to know which distribution of say > > Linux its running on. The reason being its a GTK application that > > needs to adapt itself to be a Hildon application if run on devices > > like the N800. > > I don't think it can be done. [...] > ...trying to figure out what features you have > available by guessing based on the platform type is generally the > wrong way to approach this kind of problem - only in part because you > wind up reduced to a series of heuristics to figure out the > platform. And once you've done that, you could wind up being wrong. > > Generally, you're better of probing the platform to find out if it has > the facilities you're looking for. For python, that generally means > trying to import the modules you need, and catching failures; or > possibly looking for attributes on modules if they adopt to the > environment around them. Much agreed. I just went through this with my SHM module. Compilation was failing because of a variation in ipc_perm in ipc.h on various platforms. I didn't feel confident at all that I could compile a list of all of the variations let alone keep it accurate and updated. The clincher was when I found that OS X >= 10.4 has two flavors of ipc_perm and which gets used depends on a compile flag, so identifying the OS would not have been useful in that case. OP, I don't know what a Hildon or N800 is, but is it possible that the same OS fingerprint could show up on different devices? If so then you're really out of luck. I think you'll be much better off if you focus less on the OS and more on the features it offers. Good luck -- Philip http://NikitaTheSpider.com/ Whole-site HTML validation, link checking and more -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
