context team mailing list archive

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Taco Hoekwater <taco@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> 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.

OK, so I'll keep solaris then.

>> 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.

Eeeeeem ... mea culpa. That's right. I was a bit biased by Macs. In
Mac word the official distinction between processors is
"ppc"/"powerpc" vs. "intel" (nobody says i386; maybe also because
64-bit machines still claim to be "i386").

I agree that solaris-intel is not the right name. In the mac world
"intel" comes with a reason. Under solaris it does not make too much
sence. (For macs we actually provide universal binaries as well, but
we did not make the switch [yet].)

solaris-i386? Some other proposals?

> 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.

Where luatex probably wouldn't compile anyway :) :) :)
[just joking]

Thanks for the warning,
    Mojca