[Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

[Nick Coghlan]

On 8 September 2015 at 01:36, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm still unclear on whether you'd want A or B:
>
> A) Different major/minor versions of the spec are different documents
> B) Different versions of the spec are tags or branches of the same document

I'm mainly thinking A, using versionadded tags for minor updates, and
new files for major updates.

The key thing I'd like to avoid is version pinning where we have to
uprev a higher level spec (e.g. the wheel format) just because a lower
level spec (e.g. compatibility tags) was updated in a backwards
compatible way. Using PEP numbers for cross-links between
specifications the way we do now doesn't give us that.

So, using that as an example, suppose we used a series focused naming
convention like:

    https://packaging.python.org/specifications/wheel-1.x.html

This would contain the wheel 1.x specification, with versionadded tags
for everything introduced post 1.0.

Then, rather than referring to PEP 425 specifically as it does today,
the wheel 1.x specification would instead refer to
https://packaging.python.org/specifications/compatibility-tags-1.x.html

Cheers,
Nick.

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