Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> 
> Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> added the comment:
> 
>> So what about doing the same for FreeBSD, SunOS, and Windows?
> 
> I agree that's definitely out of scope of this issue.

We could change the title of the ticket :-)

>> If we're changing "linux2" / "linux3" to just "linux", we should be
>> consistent and do it for everybody.  I propose sys.platform under 3.3
>> should contain things like "linux", "freebsd", "openbsd", "darwin",
>> and "windows".
> 
> Definitely not. The reasoning that applies to Linux doesn't necessarily
> apply to the other systems. My understanding that it definitely does not
> apply to HP-UX, where major version number changes really indicate major
> changes (unlike in Linux).

Actually, with that reasoning we would need to reintroduce the
version for Mac OS, and even go a step further and add the minor
version number as well, since since major changes have happened on Mac OS
with every single minor release for the last couple of years.

IMO, a better approach is to split the information in two parts:

 * sys.platform, which only specifies the platform name on which
   Python was built (uname -s)

 * sys.platform_build_version, which provides the full platform
   version (uname -r; either as string or as tuple or both -
   that would have to be hashed out)