Re: mingw rename

On Nov 12, 2007 10:13 PM, Roger Pack <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Currently for different windows' builds, the names for RUBY_PLATFORM
> are defined as
> i386-mingw32
> i386-mswin32
> i386-whatever
>
> A lotta people in their code like to use this to test for OS:
> if RUBY_PLATFORM !~ /mswin/
>   # do stuff
> else
>  # windows
> end

There is a better regex for windows RUBY_PLATFORM:

if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /djgpp|(cyg|ms|bcc)win|mingw/
  # do windows specific stuff
else
  # to *nix stuff
end

>
> I therefore wish that all of these somehow contained some common prefix, like
> i386-win32-mingw
> i386-win32-msvc
> i386-dos-whatever
>
> So that these comparisons can be made to still make sense with
> differing compilers
> if RUBY_PLATFORM !~ /.*w*32/
>   # do stuff
> end
>

That change will brake everything from site_ruby to gems. A lot of gem
and libraries depend on matching "mswin" or "mingw".

Also, what about win64? shouldn't that version be considered a Windows platform?

Check on garbagecollect [1] for x64 version of ruby 1.9:

RUBY_PLATFORM => x64-mswin64_80

> to allow for mingw and mswin32 is not very intuitive.
>

I agree is not easy to follow, and doing the regex all over the place
is also problematic.

I think the wide too many differences between *nix and Windows turn
the cross-platform issue into something big and unmanageable.

[1] http://www.garbagecollect.jp/ruby/mswin32/en/download/develop.html
-- 
Luis Lavena
Multimedia systems
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