In the docs for getpass:
http://docs.python.org/release/2.6.6/library/getpass.html (as an example).

It hints that getuser() doesn't work on OSX. I tried this out and it works fine for python 2.6 on 10.6.

I have included a patch for this. I believe the cleanest way to handle this is to remove the "Availability" entry as it's no longer necessary.

I think you are correct that the Availability can be removed, since the actual limits of the support are exactly as complicated as the code that supports them, and should give *some* result on most (all?) platforms.  However, OS/X is certainly covered by the current one, since OS/X is a unix flavor.  At this point in time it might be worth doing a sweep through the docs to remove all occurrences of 'Macintosh', since we don't support OS/9 any more.  There look to be less than a dozen such references in the Python3 docs.

I'm adding Gregory to nosy to see if he thinks it is appropriate to remove the 'availability' entirely, since he implemented the fallback.

Yes, it’s unclear whether Unix in the docs included Mac OS X or not.

Well, let's make it clear then.  What about replacing the text-only "Availability" with a directive that renders into a link that displays what the individual values mean?

Only because we had Macintosh in there.  We don't mention OS/X explicitly anywhere else in the docs that I could find (except one prose mention in the logging docs).

Georg: our post seem to have crossed despite Roundup's attempts at locking.  +1 to your idea about the directive.

I like the idea as well. But I'm not sure what is needed in order to help.

It requires adding code to support a new Sphinx directive.  I'm not sure if it should be a generic Sphinx directive (in which case we should open an issue on the Sphinx bug tracker) or Python specific.  If the latter, I can't at the moment tell you where the python-specific Sphinx code lives, but someone will know.

That would be Doc/tools/sphinxext/pyspecific.py

The issue still is present, wouldn't it be better to just remove the availability annotation from the docs (2.7, 3.4 and trunk) while waiting for a better solution? 

That would at least remove confusion for these docs. At the very least the "Macintosh" availability note should be removed, that was used to document that a function is available on MacOS 9, which hasn't been supported in a long time now.

New changeset c13198a2007e by Berker Peksag in branch '3.5':
Issue #12243: Remove redundant availability notes from getpass docs
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/c13198a2007e

New changeset 1bd3daae351d by Berker Peksag in branch 'default':
Issue #12243: Merge from 3.5
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/1bd3daae351d

See issue 11233 for the availability directive patch. Thanks for the patch, Bryce.

New changeset 98870f27d2ed by Berker Peksag in branch '2.7':
Issue #12243: Remove redundant availability notes from getpass docs
https://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/98870f27d2ed