Michael, your willingness to help, and the work on this issue and PR, are greatly appreciated!

Reading through the discussion here again, and the one referenced by Ned, I tend to agree with the point that having *yet another* spelling for OS checking is perhaps not a good idea.  The point that needing to see exactly which check is done in certain edge-cases is another good point against adding such new constants.  Moreover, regardless of my opinion, there isn't a consensus and at this point I don't think there will be.

Considering the above, perhaps it would be better to use only a single, "canonical" idiom throughout the tests, or at least from this point forward (to avoid a codebase-wide change)? Steve Dower said he would "prefer sys.platform to be canonical".

I do suffer from having all of os.name, sys.platform and platform.system() used in various places, and it not being clear when one should be used instead of another.