> Perhaps we should decide on which spec we really mean and meet it?

This seems hard. I always considered the "OS sub-type" to be something that
needs to be interpreted depending on ones immediate needs. While the "major
OS type" and "processor architecture" are something that give you
information which can be used in a variety of ways and are pretty well
identified, the OS subtype is a somewhat gray area. It is for example
unclear if I would be able to identify the exact "version number" of some
system in a way that makes sense. For example, the difference between Win95
and OSR2 (OS release two) is large enough that one could well say that it
constitutes a Windows 95.5 and that it should be identified separately (not
that I know how but you get the idea). On the other hand Windows Me is (from
the OS point of view) pretty much a marketing joke which (IIRC) was thrown
in because they couldn't get the "real thing" out of the door.

So I think it should be left to the VM maintainers to decide what to respond
here. I can't see any way in which the information that you are running
version "12.43" would make sense without knowing how to interpret it in the
presence of the major platform information. Introducing (for example)
arbitrary version numbers for all of those un-numbered versions of Windows
seems to look more like obfuscation than any kind of reasonable information
to me. I might be able to give you the build number of Windows but then it's
up to you to figure out if build 4567 is Windows '95 or not ;-)

Cheers,
  - Andreas

> -----Original Message-----
> From: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] On 
> Behalf Of Tim Rowledge
> Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2003 6:26 AM
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: Squeak on MacOS version identification?
> 
> 
> 
> > I have Squeak running under MacOS 8.6.	
> > Smalltalk platformName = 'Mac OS'
> > Smalltalk osVersion  = '860'
> > 
> > The only implementor of #osVersion I can find is the one in
> > SystemDictionary:  ^(self getSystemAttribute: 1002) asString
> > 
> > Can/could (Smalltalk getSystemAttribute: 1002) ever return something
> > other than a string of digits?
> According to the original design specpage (happens to be the swiki -
> http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/314 ) attribute 1000+ is 
> supposed to
> be
> -1001 - basic OS type: "unix", "win32", "mac",...
> -1002 - specific OS type: "solaris2.5" on unix, "win95" on win32,...
> -1003 - processor architecture: "68k", "x86", "PowerPC",...
> 
> So to meet this requirement the Mac ought to be returning Mac OS 8.60
> Acorn return RiscOS 4.15 (or whatever) and it looks like 
> Windows returns
> '95'' or 'NT'. Unix returns something derived from a scary looking bit
> of sed in the makefile/autoconf code and on my RH 7.1 machine it
> actually gives 'linux-gnu' which doesn't seem to quite match 
> that spec.
> 
> The method in the image merely specifies 'the operating 
> system version'.
> 
> Perhaps we should decide on which spec we really mean and meet it?
> 
> tim
> --
> Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
> "Bother," said Pooh, and deleted his message base.
>