[Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 08:36:39 -0700
Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> 
>  - Packages with non-standard non-python dependencies: libhdf5, lapack,
> BLAS, fortran(!) -- this is where the nightmare really is. I suspect most
> folks on this list will say that this is "Scipy Problem", and indeed,
> that's where the biggest issues are, and where systems like conda have
> grown up to address this.
> 
> But at this point, I think it's really sad that the community has become
> fractured -- if folks start out with "I want to do scientific computing",
> then they get pointed to Enthought Canopy or Anaconda, and all is well
> (until they look for standard web development packages -- though that's
> getting better). But if someone starts out as a web developer, and is all
> happy with the PyPA stack (virtualenv, pip, etc...), then someone suggests
> they put some Bokeh plotting in their web site, or need to do
> some analytics on HDF5 files, or any number of things well supported by
> Python, but NOT by pip/wheel -- they are kind of stuck.

Indeed, that's the main issue here. Eventually some people will want to
use llvmlite or Numba in an environment where there's also a web
application serving stuff, or who knows other combinations.

> PS: Personally, after banging my head against this for years,
> I've committed to conda for the moment -- working to get conda to better
> support the wide range of python packages. I haven't tried it on Linux, but
> it does exist and works well for some folks.

Due to the fact Linux binary wheels don't exist, conda is even more
useful on Linux...

Regards

Antoine.