[Distutils] Handling the binary dependency management problem

[Paul Moore]

On 4 December 2013 23:31, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmm, rather than adding complexity most folks don't need directly to the
> base wheel spec, here's a possible "multiwheel" notion - embed multiple
> wheels with different names inside the multiwheel, along with a
> self-contained selector function for choosing which ones to actually install
> on the current system.

That sounds like a reasonable approach. I'd be willing to try to put
together a proof of concept implementation, if people think it's
viable. What would we need to push this forward? A new PEP?

> This could be used not only for the NumPy use case, but also allow the
> distribution of external dependencies while allowing their installation to
> be skipped if they're already present on the target system.

I'm not sure how this would work - wheels don't seem to me to be
appropriate for installing "external dependencies", but as I'm not
100% clear on what you mean by that term I may be misunderstanding.
Can you provide a concrete example?

Paul