After reading the fork/mswin32 thread, I'm convinced, like many, that
this is not a language issue.

Many of us like to write portable code.  Yet, one does not necessarily
know the other systems enough to realize when he is approaching the
non-portable area.

So, while waiting for namespaces that will shout at us where we're
going, what about sketching some guidelines the non-OS-polyglot
programmer can follow?

For example, ensuring that a path you're building is valid everywhere:
File.join(dir, file) instead of "#{dir}/#{file}".  Or relying on an
external commands and assuming they are in the search path (as they
are 99% of the time on *nixes).

(Hmmm... this sounds like a wiki work.)


Massimiliano