[Distutils] Platform tags for OS X binary wheels

[Ned Deily]

In article 
<CAN4+E8GZ4JrqFcbkwaK4rkfkx-T15b_ghmATh6RAeKhqKhxzMw at mail.gmail.com>,
 Robert McGibbon <rmcgibbo at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just tried to run `pip install numpy` on my OS X 10.10.3 box, and it
> proceeds to download and compile the tarball from PyPI from source (very
> slow). I see, however, that pre-compiled OS X wheel files are available on
> PyPI for OS X 10.6 and later.
> 
> Checking the code, it looks like pip is picking up the platform tag through
> `distutils.util.get_platform()`, which returns 'macosx-10.5-x86_64' on this
> machine. At root, I think this comes from the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5
> entry in the Makefile at `python3.5/config-3.5m/Makefile`. I know that this
> value is used by distutils compiling python extension modules -- presumably
> so that they can be distributed to any target machine with OS X >=10.5 --
> so that's good. But is this the right thing for pip to be using when
> checking whether a binary wheel is compatible? I see it mentioned
> <https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0425/#id13> in PEP 425, so perhaps
> this was already hashed out on the list.

Are you using an OS X Python installed from a python.org installer?  If 
so, be aware that there are two different OS X installers on Python.org 
for each current release.  One is intended for 10.5 systems, although it 
will work on later OS X systems.  The other is for 10.6 and later 
systems.  Unless you have a need to run on 10.5 or build something that 
works on 10.5, download and use the 10.6+ installers instead.  Then the 
existing whls for products like Numpy should work just fine.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org