On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 17:38 -0300, Isaac Dupree wrote:
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"
Yes, good point. Another point for osType :: OSType in my opinion :-)
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)
Since nobody uses it, we don't need to distinguish it :-)
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 :)
The person who ports a Haskell implementation to an OS that isn't covered by the existing enumeration can add a new value to the enumeration and include that in their port and get it included in the current base package.
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??
Mm, that's an interesting point, perhaps the string isn't necessary. Duncan