[Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 August 2015 at 05:58, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> On 21 August 2015 at 07:25, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>
>> On August 20, 2015 at 3:23:09 PM, Daniel Holth (dholth at gmail.com) wrote:
>>> If you need that for some reason just put the longer information in the
>>> metadata, inside the WHEEL file for example. Surely "does it work on my
>>> system" dominates, as opposed to "I have a wheel with this mnemonic tag,
>>> now let me install debian 5 so I can get it to run".
>>>
>>>
>>
>> It’s less about “now let me install Debian 5” and more like tooling that doesn’t run *on* the platform but which needs to make decisions based on what platform a wheel is built for.
>
> Cramming that into the file name is a mistake IMO.
>
> Make it declarative data, make it indexable, and index it. We can do
> that locally as much as via the REST API.
>
> That btw is why the draft for referencing external dependencies
> specifies file names (because file names give an ABI in the context of
> a platform) - but we do need to identify the platform, and
> platform.distribution should be good enough for that (or perhaps we
> start depending on lsb-release for detection

LSB has too much stuff in it, so most distros aren't LSB compliant out
of the box - you have to install extra packages.

/etc/os-release is a better option:
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/os-release.html

My original concern with using that was that it *over*specifies the
distro (e.g. not only do CentOS and RHEL releases show up as different
platforms, but so do X.Y releases within a series), but the
binary-compatibility.txt idea resolves that issue, since a derived
distro can explicitly identify itself as binary compatible with its
upstream and be able to use the corresponding wheel files.

Regards,
Nick.

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