os.major etc. on Linux

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday May 13 2016 03:13:19 Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>os_arch is the way ports and probably MacPorts base differentiates an Intel computer from a PowerPC computer. It is not a mechanism to determine the bitness; if you need to determine bitness, use other methods, such as build_arch and universal_archs. build_arch and universal_arch determines how a package is registered when installed; os_arch doesn't enter into it, as far as I know.

Apparently it does somewhere, at least on platforms other than Darwin. It's a shame that I didn't really document most of the Linux-adaptations I applied because I knew it's not an officially supported platform for actual use. 
What's about certain is that my software images ended up having i386 in their name, and I don't think that's appropriate on a 64-bit host, regardless the OS.

It would probably have been a good idea to use a less confusing term (like x86) instead of i386, but well, that's another discussion.

>Ports use os_arch indirectly when they contain a "platform i386" or "platform powerpc" block.

Ah, and "platform i386" means Intel regardless of address-length? That's about as direct a use of os_arch as I can see...

R.