[Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 7:07 AM, Nate Coraor <nate at bx.psu.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 9:05 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> From my reading of what the Enthought and Continuum folks were saying
>> about how they are successfully distributing binaries across different
>> distributions, it sounds like the additional piece that would take this from
>> a interesting experiment to basically-immediately-usable would be to teach
>> pip that if no binary-compatibility.cfg is provided, then it should assume
>> by default that the compatible systems whose wheels should be installed are:
>> (1) the current system's exact tag,
>
> This should already be the case - the default tag will no longer be
> -linux_x86_64, it'd be linux_x86_64_distro_version.
>
>>
>> (2) the special hard-coded tag "centos5". (That's what everyone actually
>> uses in practice, right?)
>
> The idea here is that we should attempt to install centos5 wheels if more
> specific wheels for the platform aren't available?

Yes.

Or more generally, we should pick some common baseline build
environment such that we're pretty sure wheels built there can run on
99% of end-user systems and give this environment a name. (Doesn't
have to be "centos5", though IIUC CentOS 5 is what people are using
for this baseline build environment right now.) That way when distros
catch up and start providing binary-compatibility.cfg files, we can
give tell them that this is an environment that they should try to
support because it's what everyone is using, and to kick start that
process we should assume it as a default until the distros do catch
up. This has two benefits: it means that these wheels would actually
become useful in some reasonable amount of time, and as a bonus, it
would provide a clear incentive for those rare distros that *aren't*
compatible to document that by starting to provide a
binary-compatibility.cfg.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org