From: Joe Van Dyk <joevandyk@...>
Date: 2006-03-09T06:18:02+09:00
Subject: idioms for separating out OS-specific stuff

I have a few functions that:
  - get the current user's login name
  - checks to see what the CPU % of a process is (non the Ruby
process, another process).  This includes all the threads that the
process has
  - forks a new process
  - sees if a process is still running
  - gets the utilization percentage of a NIC on the machine
  - the load average of the machine
  - the number of CPUs on a given machine

This is all working fine on Linux with kernel 2.4.  However, the code
doesn't quite run correctly on a 2.6 kernel (not sure why yet).  And
forget about OS X and Windows and *BSD.

Are there any good Ruby idioms for managing the separate OS-specific functions?

My first thought:
module SystemSpecificMethods
 module Linux
    # generic linux functions in here

    module 2.4
      # linux 2.4 functions in here
    end

    module 2.6
      # linux 2.6 functions in here
    end
  end

  module Windows
    # Windows functions here
  end

  module BSD
    # OS X and maybe *BSD functions here
  end
end

And then probe (somwhow?) to figure out what OS I'm running on and
then including the correct modules into my code.  So, if I were using
Linux 2.6, I'd include SystemSpecificFunctions::Linux and
SystemSpecificFunctions::Linux::2.6.

But I'm sure that's a pretty dumb way of doing it, as I'm not terribly bright.

Joe