Stef Walter wrote:
> Other OSs have special cases in get_platform() to specifically limit the 
> amount of code, and make proper decisions with regard to package 
> compatibility. 
>
> Here's an example this commit for Mac OS X: http://svn.python.org/view?
> view=rev&revision=67988
> 
> It was discussed here at this issue: http://bugs.python.org/issue4064

Well, if you try to install .egg files built as universal binaries
on a system that uses a non-SDK build of Python on a PPC system,
you'll have a similar problem.

easy_install will look for '...-ppc', but the file is name '...-fat'.

But you do have a point: the '10.4' is actually an indicator for
the SDK version, not the version of the OS where the package
was built.

> Another example is how linux has no version information at all (ie: 
> linux-i586).

Right... the Linux major version doesn't change that often,
while the minor ones do change very often and don't really
give the user any useful information w/r to Python extensions.

As a result, using "Linux-2.6.22.19-0.4-default" in the name
would cause more user concern than necessary.

> Perhaps this is why the easy_install authors thought their 
> package system worked. They only tested it on linux?

Probably. Most .eggs are Python-only, so they don't even need a
platform string. The others are mostly for Windows.

> Yes I agree that obviously this cannot be changed for 2.6. But it would 
> be great to get this code in for python 2.7
> 
> Anyway, this is ultimately your call, since I don't have the 50,000 foot 
> view over the entire situation. 

Is that binary compatibility scheme documented somewhere ?

If so, we could switch to '%s-%s' % (sys.platform, machine)
for Python 2.7.

> FWIW, I've had to patch python in a very large set of client 
> installations. This patch has become a routine in order to unbreak 
> python wrt to platform dependent packages.

Since this only affects easy_install/setuptools, it's probably
easier to just create a patched egg for that and then use it
with the normal Python installation.