From: Hongli Lai <hongli@...99.net>
Date: 2009-05-29T21:34:32+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:23621] Re: Meaning of RUBY_PLATFORM

Roger Pack wrote:
> Perhaps now is a good time to bring up a thought on adding some more
> constants (sorry if this is a repost)..
> Currently it is "hard" to know what OS you're on by regex'ing RUBY_PLATFORM
> you can't do RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /win/ since it would match darwin, so in
> general it causes confusion (and bugs) among gem developers.
> That being said, they aren't "huge" bugs and only gem developers who
> care about windows have to target them, but it's still...not easy.
> 
> My own wish would be that there was some way easier to discover platform.
> One way might be RUBY_OS -> ['linux', 'aix', 'win32', 'win64' etc.]
> 
> Gem::Platform.local seems to almost get us there...
> #<Gem::Platform:0x169e060 @cpu="x86", @os="mingw32", @version=nil>
> but not quite.  Maybe I should submit a patch to gems like
> Gem::Platform.local.os -> ['windows'] etc.
> 
> Somewhat unrelated is that currently you can't tell from within ruby
> what compiler version created it.  A way to overcome this might be
> something like
> COMPILER and COMPILER_VERSION
> 
> ex:
> 
>  >> Rubinius::COMPILER
> => :gcc
>  >> Rubinius::COMPILER_VERSION
> => "4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5490)"
> 
> 
> Thoughts on either of those?

I'm not convinced that this functionality needs to be bundled with Ruby. 
You could use the 'ohai' library to obtain a lot of system information.