[Distutils] What metadata does pip actually need about sdists?

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> So instead, the current plan is that we're going
>> to drop the libraries inside a wheel and upload it to PyPI:
>
> aha... ok, now it's clearer where you're coming from.
> but using what platform in the wheel tag?
> linux wheels are blocked currently

Windows is the first goal, likely OS X after that (OS X provides a bit
more in the base system so distributing these external dependencies
isn't as urgent, but it would be good eventually), and yeah, doing
this for Linux would obviously require unblocking Linux wheels.

(We do have a plan for unblocking them, but the critical person is a
bit busy so I'm not sure how long it will be before it can be unveiled
:-). It's not really a secret, the plan is just: take advantage of
Continuum and Enthought's hard-won knowledge from distributing
hundreds of thousands of pre-built python package binaries on Linux to
define a named "common Linux platform" abi tag that is known to be
abi-compatible with >99.99% of Linux installs out there. This doesn't
prevent the use of other abi tags -- e.g. distro-specific ones -- or
the development of more detailed metadata about "distro dependencies",
and wouldn't require that every single Linux box be willing to install
wheels with this abi tag, but it would at least bring Linux support up
to parity with the other platforms.)

> regardless of the tagging though, I'm not so sure about using PyPI like this
> to hold all these "python" wrapper packages for binary extensions

If someone else invents a better solution before this is implemented
then of course we'd switch to that instead...

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org