Re: MacOSX: ismac() implementation

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 01/09/07, Thomas Treichl <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso schrieb:
> > On 01/09/07, Thomas Treichl <address@hidden> wrote:
> >>   if (regexp (vhost, '(.+)-apple-darwin(.+)'))
> >
> > Not that I want to start a discussion here, but just curious: will
> > this regexp also match a GNU/Darwin system? Could that conceivably be
> > a problem?
> >
> > - Jordi G. H.
>
> So just checking for Darwin without Apple would make more sense, right ;) This
> also makes me thinking about that we should keep isunix() for Mac and take a
> higher level implementation for ismac(), what would you say Jordi?

Although Apple ripped off free BSD code to create MacOS X (and closed
it up, which I don't particularly like, but let's have this flamewar
some other time), it also tampered with some age-old Unix traditions,
like messing around with the directory structure. In particular, MacOS
X is very far from adhering to the FHS[1].

I think that GNU-Darwin is much closer to adhering to Unix practices
than MacOS X is, so isunix() should return true for GNU-Darwin and
false for MacOS X. This whole point can be moot, though, because I
don't think I've ever seen a GNU-Darwin user in my life, much less one
who uses Octave. ;-)

Btw, exactly what code is platform-specific? I remember that there
were some efforts recently in this list to get code to compile under
Windows with a non-gcc compiler, and that there were issues compiling
with MacOS X precisely because that OS doesn't obey the FHS. Is that
about it, getting Octave to compile?

- Jordi G. H.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard