Merged revisions 67982,67988,67990 via svnmerge from

svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/trunk

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  r67982 | benjamin.peterson | 2008-12-28 09:37:31 -0600 (Sun, 28 Dec 2008) | 1 line

  fix WORD_BIGEDIAN declaration in Universal builds; fixes #4060 and #4728
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  r67988 | ronald.oussoren | 2008-12-28 13:40:56 -0600 (Sun, 28 Dec 2008) | 1 line

  Issue4064: architecture string for universal builds on OSX
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  r67990 | ronald.oussoren | 2008-12-28 13:50:40 -0600 (Sun, 28 Dec 2008) | 3 lines

  Update the fix for issue4064 to deal correctly with all three variants of
  universal builds that are presented by the configure script.
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1 files changed, 18 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Doc/distutils/apiref.rst b/Doc/distutils/apiref.rst
index f2d863c79c..c3148a647c 100644
--- a/Doc/distutils/apiref.rst
+++ b/Doc/distutils/apiref.rst
@@ -1100,6 +1100,24 @@ other utility module.
 
    For non-POSIX platforms, currently just returns ``sys.platform``.
 
+   For MacOS X systems the OS version reflects the minimal version on which
+   binaries will run (that is, the value of ``MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET``
+   during the build of Python), not the OS version of the current system. 
+
+   For universal binary builds on MacOS X the architecture value reflects
+   the univeral binary status instead of the architecture of the current
+   processor. For 32-bit universal binaries the architecture is ``fat``, 
+   for 64-bit universal binaries the architecture is ``fat64``, and 
+   for 4-way universal binaries the architecture is ``universal``. 
+
+   Examples of returned values on MacOS X:
+
+   * ``macosx-10.3-ppc``
+
+   * ``macosx-10.3-fat``
+
+   * ``macosx-10.5-universal``
+
    .. % XXX isn't this also provided by some other non-distutils module?