context team mailing list archive

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:10 AM, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
>>> On TL their name is i386-solaris (uname returns solaris), the current
>>> name that Hans suggested a while ago is sunos-intel. We started with
>>> "sun" (sparc-solaris on TL), but that doesn't work at the moment.
>>  solaris-intel, in that order (to match osx-intel, etc.).  SunOS has a
>> slightly older tune to it, since it's the name that Sun used for its OS,
>> before it was changed to Solaris (about 15 years ago, and clearly we are
>> not going to support that).
> 
> Just one more thing ... uname -s returns SunOS? Why does TeXLive use
> solaris then? (I was confused by the latter.)

What is now called Solaris used to be called SunOS, but it was
initially more a new name than a new design. Some versions of
the system even had double names, iirc, a bit like OSX and Darwin.

The output of uname() is used by programs, so it was probably
left unchanged for compatibility reasons.

> The names seemed a bit weird (too long) to me, that's all. We kept the
> names that Hans had (back then when there was still only support for
> both flavours of linux, windows and mac) Apart from linux no uname
> value made sense. Windows has none, and I bet that many Mac owners
> have never heard of Darwin.

Sure, I was just a tad unhappy about the chip architecture names,
because "i386" are not the only chips made by Intel and chips for
that platform are also made by AMD, etc. But it is not very
important, and you are right that users will probably not know
the official names anyway.

> One thing that is a bit weird is that those strings (linux-64
> osx-intel etc.) are hardcoded in luatex, if I remember correctly. (I
> might be wrong.) At that level they should indeed better be called
> linux-i386. But I should check again to remember all the details of
> past discussions.

"Hans-style" platform names are available as the variable os.name,
and there is os.type, and there is also a working os.uname function
(even on windows).

os.type can be: "windows", "msdos", "unix"

os.name can be: "windows", "msdos", "bsd", "sysv", "generic", "linux",
  "freebsd", "openbsd", "solaris", "sunos", "hpux", "irix", "macosx"

The names "bsd", "sysv" and "generic" are used for otherwise
undetermined flavors of unix.

Best wishes,
Taco