Question about `platforms` and `${os.platform}`

[Christopher Chavez]

> Before you mentioned the AppKit overhaul some time ago and started addressing it in your ports, I had never heard of it and I don't think anyone else's ports do anything about it. So either we have a lot of broken ports due to this problem that we're not aware of, or for some reason it uniquely affects the ports you maintain...


I want say this issue is not extremely uncommon, even if awareness of it is. One instance of this is Tcl/Tk, which decided to predefine the deprecated names of constants/functions/etc. to the 10.12 names when compiling for ≥10.12, and leave usage of deprecated constants in their codebase alone (leaving nothing for MacPorts to fix).

Maybe there are still projects using the deprecated names which ignore or suppress warnings from -Wdeprecated-declarations.

But if an upstream project switched to the 10.12 names and effectively dropped support for ≤10.11, I imagine the easiest course of action for a port that then broke on ≤10.11 was to just drop support for ≤10.11 (and not necessarily leave a more specific comment explaining why). Next up from that might be to patch the old names back in, and either ignore deprecation warnings on ≥10.12, patch only on ≤10.11, or suppressing warnings on ≥10.12.


Christopher A. Chavez