When to distinguish OS versions in canonical names for target platforms

Question

I would like to organize my company's software releases by platform. I've looked at how Mozilla, Perforce, and Apache organize their releases, and it seems that I should partition by OS and processor architecture. I was thinking of something like this:

• Linux (x86-32)
• Linux (x86-64)
• Neutrino (x86-32)
• Windows (x86-32)
• Windows (x86-64)

Is it common to distinguish between versions of Windows, Linux, or OS X? For example, should I be specifying the Linux kernel version?

Answer 1

I would say only if it matters. If you know there are issues with the prior version(s) of the kernel OR if you have not tested with earlier versions, then you should put something like "3.3+" to indicate that anything after kernel 3.3 is known to be tested and good. Anything else is unsupported - it may work, it may not.