[Distutils] warning about potential problem for wheels

[Donald Stufft]

Will something built against 3.5.0 with SSE work on 3.5.1 without SSE? What about the inverse?

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 11, 2015, at 10:17 AM, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:
> 
> An extra data point is that we've had exactly one report of Python 3.5 not working due to lack of SSE, and that person was also on Windows XP (so zero reports on supported platforms).
> 
> That said, I should probably just fix 3.5.1 to not use SSE for core or distutils builds. I doubt there was a huge performance increase due to it (mainly in memcpy I'd assume).
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve
> 
> Top-posted from my Windows Phone
> From: Nathaniel Smith
> Sent: ‎10/‎10/‎2015 16:11
> To: Laura Creighton
> Cc: distutils-sig
> Subject: Re: [Distutils] warning about potential problem for wheels
> 
> On Oct 10, 2015 3:37 PM, "Laura Creighton" <lac at openend.se> wrote:
> >
> > In a message of Sat, 10 Oct 2015 21:52:58 -0000, Oscar Benjamin writes:
> >
> > >Really this is just a case of an unsupported platform. It's unfortunate
> > >that CPython doesn't properly support this hardware but I think it's
> > >reasonable that if you have to build your interpreter from source then you
> > >have to build your extension modules as well.
> >
> > Alas that there is no easy way to detect.  The situation I am
> > imagining is where the administrators of a school build pythons for
> > the students to run on their obsolete hardware, and then the poor
> > students don't understand why pip doesn't work.  But I suppose we
> > will just get to deal with that problem when and if it happens.
> 
> In case some numbers help: the numerical community has been tracking the deployment of SSE2 to decide when to switch over for numpy/scipy builds, and at this point what I hear is:
> - ~0.5% of Firefox crashes are on machines that are missing SSE2
> - <0.1% of machines with Steam installed are missing SSE2
> 
> I'm not sure what python distributions like Anaconda or Activestate are doing wrt SSE2, but even if their builds do require SSE2 then their build tooling might provide a quick way to generate a whole installable environment with custom build options for targeting older systems. (Continuum as of today still hasn't released build scripts for the bottom of their stack -- python/numpy/etc. -- but they've claimed willingness to do so and there's increasing calls to make a "centos" version of Anaconda. And all the tooling beyond that -- e.g. the actual package manager -- is FOSS.)
> 
> -n
> 
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