[Distutils] binary wheels, linux and ucs2/4

[Nick Coghlan]

On 29 January 2015 at 22:45, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 January 2015 at 11:55, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>> ...but I'm none the wiser. What's the state of play with this?
>
> Currently, the tags don't include the UCS setting. "It's being worked
> on" (as with most other aspects of Linux ABI compatibility).

It's more accurate to say "we're open to suggestions". My last idea
(deriving a more specific platform tag from /etc/os-release) was shot
down for several entirely valid reasons, so there isn't currently a
concrete proposal on the table.

I'm pretty sure we're all agreed that the current definition of the
platform tag in PEP 425 is entirely inadequate for *nix systems other
than Mac OS X, but a lot of us have other options there to use as a
workaround or because it's what we were doing anyway (like using
system packages instead of wheels for our binary distribution).

So while I'll definitely need to help work out an agreed solution
before we take the idea of a Fedora specific wheel repo beyond the
pilot stage, we have no ETA on that at the moment, which means there's
no guarantee on when I'll get to pushing such an enhancement forward
myself.

>> How can we build PyCrypto for Python 2, both UCS2 and UCS4, and have them
>> both in the same repo and have pip pick the right one?
>
> At the moment, you can't, you'll need separate UCS2 and UCS4 repos.

This could potentially be worked around in pip and setuptools, by
having them calculate a suitable wheel ABI tag on Python 2.

If we're on CPython 2.x and sysconfig.get_config_var('SOABI') returns
None, then we can calculate a synthetic SOABI tag as:

* the start of the SOABI tag should be "cpython-"
* the next two digits will be the major/minor of the release (i.e. 26 or 27)
* the next character will be 'd' if sys.pydebug is set (I'm fairly
sure, but double check this)
* we can assume 'm' (for using pymalloc) safely enough
* the final character will be 'u' if sys.maxunicode == 0x10ffff

We're not going to add a new kind of ABI variation to Python 2 at this
stage of its lifecycle, so that calculation should remain valid for as
long as Python 2 remains in use.

Cheers,
Nick.

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