[Distutils] Plans for binary wheels, and PyPi and OS-X

[Chris Barker]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>> Thanks -- but really? don't OS-X wheels get:
>>
>> macosx_10_6_intel
>>
>> or some such tacked on? Where does that go wrong?
>
> Homebrew, Mac Ports, Fink. That would work OK if nobody ever installed things
> that the system didn't provide.

OK -- yes, that will NEVER work. It's worse than the Linux situation.

But then, it's the same everywhere -- if someone builds a binary wheel
for Windows that depends on some non-standard dll, or is built against
a weirdly custom-built Python, it won't work either.

It's been more or less a consensus in the python-mac community that we
seek to provide binaries for the Python.org pythons, and that they
shouldn't depend on non-standard external libs -- just like on
Windows. Major hard-to-build packages have been doing this for years:

wxPython
numpy, scipy, matplotlib

But these installers often don't work with virtualenv, and can't be
discovered or installed  pip or easy_install.

So I think it would be VERY useful if we established this standard for
PyPi and binary wheels.

macports, fink, and homebrew have been doing their own thing for ages,
and can continue to do so -- they HAVE package management built in,
just like the linux distros. If they want to do wheels, they will need
to make sure that the neccesary info is in the platform-tag. On my
python.org build:

'macosx-10.6-i386'

so they should patch their python to return something like:

'macosx-macports-10.6-i386'

or just:

'macports-10.6-i386'

and probably a macports version, rather than "10.6".

However, the _point_ of macports, homebrew, etc, is that your stuff is
all custom compiled for your system the way you have configured it --
so binary wheels really don't make sense.

-Chris

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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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