[Distutils] [final version?] PEP 513 - A Platform Tag for Portable Linux Built Distributions

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

> On Feb 1, 2016, at 3:37 PM, Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
> On 30.01.2016 00:29, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I think this is ready for pronouncement now -- thanks to everyone for
>> all their feedback over the last few weeks!
> 
> I don't think so.  I am biased because I'm the maintainer for Python in Debian/Ubuntu.  So I would like to have some feedback from maintainers of Python in other Linux distributions (Nick, no, you're not one of these).

Possibly, but it would be very helpful for such maintainers to limit their critique to "in what scenarios will this fail for users" and not have the whole peanut gallery chiming in with "well on _my_ platform we would have done it _this_ way".

I respect what you've done for Debian and Ubuntu, Matthias, and I use the heck out of that work, but honestly this whole message just comes across as sour grapes that someone didn't pick a super-old Debian instead of a super-old Red Hat.  I don't think it's promoting any progress.

> The proposal just takes some environment and declares that as a standard.  So everybody wanting to supply these wheels basically has to use this environment.

There's already been lots of discussion about how this environment is a lowest common denominator.  Many other similar environments could _also_ be lowest common denominator.

> Without giving any details, without giving any advise how to produce such wheels in other environments. Without giving any hints how such wheels may be broken with newer environments.

They won't be.  That's the whole point.

> Without mentioning this is am64/i386 only.

Wheels already have an architecture tag, separate from the platform tag, so this being "am64/i386" is irrelevant.

> There might be more. Pretty please be specific about your environment.  Have a look how the LSB specifies requirements on the runtime environment ... and then ask yourself why the lsb doesn't have any real value.


In the future, more specific and featureful distro tags sound like a good idea.  But could we please stop making the default position on distutils-sig "this doesn't cater to my one specific environment in the most optimal possible way, so let's give up on progress entirely"?  This is a good proposal that addresses environment portability and gives Python a substantially better build-artifact story than it currently has, in the environment most desperately needing one (server-side linux).  Could it be better?  Of course.  It could be lots better.  There are lots of use-cases for dynamically linked wheels and fancy new platform library features in newer linuxes.  But that can all come later, and none of it needs to have an impact on this specific proposal, right now.

-glyph