[Distutils] OS X and PEP 425 / wheels

[Nick Coghlan]

On 8 March 2014 05:53, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> +1 This looks good to me.
>
> In theory, this logic should really go with python itself, not a third-party
> lib. i.e., once built, a Python implementation will match particular tags --
> having a third party lib keep track of that seems to be putting it in the
> wrong place.
>
> In practice, there are only so many versions out there, and we're only
> trying to support some of them, so it's probably fine for it to be in pip
> (and it can be upgraded so much more easily there)

The problem is that some platforms change faster than Python does
(particularly when people are running older Python versions in
production), so we've learned that coupling a lot of these details to
the standard library doesn't work. There's also the fact that we're
trying to retrofit capabilities to older versions of Python that are
no longer receiving new features (2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3).

You see similar behaviour from the platform vendors themselves.
Microsoft Visual Studio and Red Hat's Developer Toolset, for example,
are both versioned independently from the underlying OS.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia