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

[Matthias Klose]

On 10.02.2016 21:26, Donald Stufft wrote:
>
>> On Feb 10, 2016, at 3:18 PM, Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> But then why call it manylinux instead of centos5? You build it on this OS, you expect others to build it on this OS. just name it what it is.
>
>
> Because this is a very specific subset of CentOS 5 that has shown to, in practice, work cross distro into the vast majority of glibc using Linux distributions. The idea here is that if you restrict yourself to these subset of libraries, you’ll produce a wheel that can be installed on say, Debian (assuming a recent enough Debian is used, which is why we’re using the very ancient CentOS 5, so it’s sufficiently old) and not have ABI issues to contend with.
>
> “manylinux” is a nicer name than “builtoncentos5butinawaythatisusableonmanyotherlinuxsystems”.

the python community has a "good" history calling things if they don't like 
them.  the most longest option names were invented by the setuptools maintainers.