[Rubygems-developers] Platform Specification and Auto-selecting the Platform

[Thomas Palmer]

Jim Weirich wrote:
>  > - How do you plan to enforce the new platform format?  Will there be
>  > specific structures and fields in the gem spec to support the
>  > hierarchy you proposed?  What will prevent people from circumventing
>  > this and submitting invalid platforms (if this is possible)?
>
> I've not given this part too much thought yet. I suspect the
> range of hardware designations will have to be somewhat
> controlled, otherwise you will get a variety of synonyms for the
> same platform (e.g. "windows" vs "win32" vs "mswin", or even
> "macos" vs "osx" vs "darwin"). I hope the data from the tottle
> project will drive the specific designations. I'm just trying to
> put together a framework for categorizing them.
>
>  

Thanks much for the plan to work on this.

For the platforms, I agree that lots of ways of saying the same thing is 
bad. But inability for someone to add a new platform designation on 
their own would also be bad.

If the Ruby runtime can state its own platform (which it can - if I 
understand correctly), then it seems like those are the naming 
conventions to gravitate around, especially if auto-selection was 
working. That might be enough gravity to avoid needing to hardcode an 
acceptable list in RubyGems.

- Tom