I spent so much time updating the wheels builds to 64 bit BLAS mostly because
- I needed to actually understand how multibuild worked (and docs are minimal).
- I don't know powershell (and docs are hard to find).
- I don't know azure works at a lower level (and docs are hard to find).
Yes, this is a problem. powershell/bash + no docs is not a recipe for success. Longer term we could move it over to cibuildwheel which has decent docs, but that in itself is a lot of work so it won't happen overnight.
And I thought it would all be drop in easy :) What that indicates to me is that we could use a build expert and simpler infrastructure. Anaconda no doubt has people far more knowledgeable about such matters than I am.
As to the twitter thread, what is the proposal(s)?
There's no proposal yet, still stewing a bit on it. Although maybe the first part of one is ready: no more new wheel flavors for things with <<0.5% of the user base.
I'm perfectly happy to leave support for more exotic platforms to people who have the hardware and make use of it, but no doubt such people have the opposite problem of not knowing much about NumPy.
Let me add that distutils brings it's own set of problems. A better build system could help make building wheels simpler on various platforms. But then, someone would also need to become expert in that build system.
Working on that one:)
Cheers,
Ralf