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

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 21 Oct, 2013, at 20:52, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 21, 2013, at 1:02 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> -- it would be very useful if folks could easily
>>>> get binary wheels for OS-X
>>> 
>>> We do plan to support it, but the pip devs uncovered a hole in the current
>>> wheel spec that means it generates the same filename on *nix systems for
>>> wheels that need to have different names for the download side of things to
>>> work properly
>> 
>> 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.

I don't understand this, what would break? Binary wheels that reference shared libraries that aren't included in the wheel (or a default system install) won't work, but that's also true on Windows.    

What makes OSX more fun[1] than Linux is including shared libraries in the binary archive, unless you are careful with linking you'll end up with binaries that can only be installed in 1 filesystem location (that is, don't work in virtualenvs).

Ronald

[1] for a fairly twisted definition of fun ;-)