On Apr 14, 2018, at 4:57 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:

Is the suggestion to use the `_internal` import, or carry a copy of
the pep425tags code myself, that I have to keep up to date with the
internal pip copy?  That would also involve me copying the `glibc`
part of the code.  I see that the `wheel` package has an old copy of
that code too, which doesn't deal with manylinux wheels.    You
probably saw that `pip-tools` ended up vendoring the whole of pip9
[1].

The best solution is to figure out what APIs people need, and either add them to packaging and have pip consume that as well as anyone else, or make a new library for the same.

If that’s unacceptable, vendoring or version pinning is probably the best option.