STINNER Victor wrote:
> 
> STINNER Victor <victor.stinner@haypocalc.com> added the comment:
> 
>> sys.platform refers to build time information,
>> so the platform module won't help.
> 
> When I wrote my patch, I realized that sys.platform is used to get the runtime information, which is wrong. See the tests in Lib/test/test_*.py: they use sys.platform to check features of the running OS (kernel). It is mostly to test FreeBSD major version, and it looks like Python is build on the same FreeBSD major version that it is running on. Maybe because on FreeBSD, most programs are compiled instead of using prebuild packages (pkgadd).

Right. FreeBSD doesn't ship prebuilt binaries for packages -
it uses a very elegant "ports" collection, where everything gets
compiled on the target machine:

    http://www.freebsd.org/ports/

So you don't really run into the issue of using a older Python build
on the system, unless you have an application which ships Python
along with the application package.