Issue1737

It'd be nice to have os.major and os.minor, for the backup program I'm writing.  It currently runs on CPython 2.x, CPython 3.x, PyPy 1.4.1 and recent PyPy trunks.  I'd like to add Jython 2.5.x to that list.

For now, I'm coding around their absence, but this'll make Jython a less appropriate runtime for this program.

I think os.makedev() also belongs in this list then

Note that this information is not available from standard java.

Jython, because it has posix support, does provide access to the device number, in the st_dev field of the tuple returned from os.stat.

>>> import os
>>> st = os.stat('.')
>>> print st
(16895, 0L, 23L, 1, 0, 0, 0L, 1318677370, 1318677370, 1318677217)
>>> import stat
>>> device_number = st[stat.ST_DEV]
>>> print device_number
23L

However, extracting a major and minor device number from that device number is platform-dependent, AFAIK, meaning that the major and minor device numbers will appear in different bit positions in that device number, on different platforms.

Implementing platform-specific versions of the major and minor functions for each platform has yet been implemented on jython.

Patches welcome.

This platform variability is further confirmed by the lack of the minor() and minor() functions in cpython on windows.

>C:\Python26\python.exe
Python 2.6.4 (r264:75708, Oct 26 2009, 08:23:19) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> os.major
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'major'
>>> os.minor
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'minor'
>>> os.makedev
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'makedev'
>>>