[lxml-dev] lxml and binary eggs on Linux
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Hi there, In the past we've been in the habit of providing binary eggs for lxml on Linux. We've been less diligent about this recently, which is actually a good thing. I would in fact ask everybody to stop uploading binary eggs for Linux, and only do so for Windows. Why? Python interpreters on the Linux world are compiled with different options. Prominent here is UCS2 versus UCS4 for the internal unicode encoding. An egg compiled for a UCS4 python doesn't work on a UCS2 python and vice versa. There are other potential issues, such as the location of various shared libraries that might differ per platform. Uploading a binary egg means that we risk making life worse for some users, as they'll be stuck with a non-working egg. If we only upload the source (including the generated C code), lxml will compile and install itself and this should be reliable on all Linux boxes. This does however mean that people need to install the libxml2 and libxslt headers on their system (libxml2-dev and libxstl-dev on debian/ubuntu), otherwise the compile would fail. It would also mean we need to modify our installation instructions. Unfortunately I don't see any other way to make lxml installation more reliable on Linux, though. On Windows, because nobody has a compiler and the platform is more uniform (practically everybody runs the same compiled version of Python), we don't have this problem. In fact we have the problem that nobody has a compiler, so we certainly need to continue uploading the binary eggs. Comments? Regards, Martijn
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Hi Martijn, Martijn Faassen wrote:
I think this makes sense. While Linux is definitely not a straight forward platform for binaries, it's a rather uniform platform for source installations (as long as we don't require the most recent dependency versions installed). And we shouldn't forget that Debian and related distributions come with ready-to-install versions of lxml well integrated into their package management system. Any volunteers for a rewrite of build.txt? Stefan
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Hi Martijn, Martijn Faassen wrote:
I think this makes sense. While Linux is definitely not a straight forward platform for binaries, it's a rather uniform platform for source installations (as long as we don't require the most recent dependency versions installed). And we shouldn't forget that Debian and related distributions come with ready-to-install versions of lxml well integrated into their package management system. Any volunteers for a rewrite of build.txt? Stefan
participants (2)
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Martijn Faassen
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Stefan Behnel