> My question too!  I would say that stable releases should probably not get
> this change, but should force sys.platform to linux2 on 3.x kernels.
>

The point is precisely that we don't change anything: applications
checking against sys.platform are already broken, there's no reason to
comfort them into using this defective check.
The applications that encountered the problem (chromium, matplotlib
and probably others) already performed the change to
sys.platform.startswith(), so it's really the only way to go.

> BTW, does anybody think sys.platform should use a more dynamic approach for
> calculating its value?  Well, maybe not necessary if Python 3.3 will just say
> 'linux'.

There's already platform.system() for that.