Duncan Coutts wrote:
We have not reached consensus on this issue yet.
Based on informal chats with interested people, here is another concrete proposal:
Instead of adding isWindows, isBeOS, isNixOS etc we have a simple enumeration of the major OS flavour:
data OSFlavour = Linux | Windows | MacOS | BSD | Solaris | Other String
test like (osFlavour == Windows) note some people may try to spell it as "osFlavor" MacOSX is completely different architecturally than the pre-X Mac OS (the latter of which, practically no one tries to support anymore, but at least _used to_ be worth mentioning in enumerations) Plain Solaris is rather different than Solaris spammed with GNU utilities etc... in the Unix world, OS's are not always so clear - but the core, kernel, stuff makes it clear as far as I'm aware of, and the rest is where particular feature tests are used. I suspect that people too often assume that the same features are available on all unixes, given how common it is to break on some of them. The common feature-set will likely be provided by haskell libraries anyway (in which case the libraries have to decide how to implement on each platform... okay) I don't like the way that enumeration scheme interacts with new OS's. What happens when/if Hurd or ReactOS or who-knows-what become viable OSes. Are they different enough from the other OSes that they should go in Other or (breakingly for any code that tries to detect it) be added to the enumeration? Seems to make an "isUnixLike" difficult to implement in terms of it... unless it's a feature test :) None of the existing OSes get subtypes... what if "Other" is also standalone, not having a String argument (and whenever someone wants to detect some other OS, I guess they petition to have the enumeration expanded and it will be promptly) - how is that on the problem scale?? It's a difficult question, taken generally. In some cases a haskell-program-user may even want to specify how to treat their environment (cygwin comes to mind). If only there was a decent package system- but I digress, Isaac