Guidelines: POSIX Guidelines, GNU Standards & Portability¶
Cross-Platform Portability¶
Command-line utilities should comply with the essential components of:
By following these guidelines and standards your command-line tools will provide a level of consistency and familiarity to users working across many different platforms, such as Linux, Mac OsX®, and Windows®.
Hint
Do not blindly implement these guidelines & standards in their entirety; instead focus on the commonly practiced conventions within each. This document is designed to help highlight what those conventions are.
Cross-Version Portability¶
If you plan to share your utility with the world the Command-Line Interface
(CLI) and Input/Output (I/O) functions should be designed to work across all
standard versions of Python 2.6, 2.7 & 3.3+. It’s best to put your
cross-version compatiblity operations into a separate module named
_compat.py.