On Aug 18, 2011, at 03:58 PM, STINNER Victor wrote:

>
>STINNER Victor <victor.stinner@haypocalc.com> added the comment:
>
>> I'm just suggesting one more special case for linux*
>
>You suggest to have a special case in Python 2.7 and 3.2, but not in Python
>3.3 (3.1, 2.6, etc.)?

Correct.  We can't touch Python 3.1, 2.6, or earlier because those are all in
security-only mode, and unless a specific security related issue is
identified, the change should not be made there.  That's just life (a recent
similar example is support for multiarch in newer Debian and Ubuntu releases -
we just don't support that in security-only Pythons).

We can and should change Python 3.2 and 2.7 to only report 'linux2' for
backward compatibility.

For Python 3.3, we should do the right thing, which IMO is to set sys.platform
to 'linux' without the version number.  In parallel we can change the stdlib
tests to use .startswith() and encourage third party developers to use
.startswith() also.