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

[Matthias Klose]

On 16.02.2016 15:43, David Cournapeau wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:05 AM, Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
>> On 02.02.2016 02:35, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> You may call this sour grapes, but in the light of people installing
>> these wheels to replace/upgrade system installed eggs, it becomes an
>> issue. It's fine to use such wheels in a virtual environment, however
>> people tell users to use these wheels to replace system installed packages,
>> distros will have a problem identifying issues.
>>
>
> FWIW, I often point out when people put "sudo" and "pip" in the same
> sentence.
>
> What about adding some language around this to the PEP ?

that's one thing.  But maybe pip itself could error out on such a situation, and 
maybe overriden with a non-default flag.

I know we had such an issue where pip accidentally modified system installed 
files, maybe Barry still remembers the details ...

> 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.
>>>
>>
>> I'm unsure how more specific and featureful distro tags will help, unless
>> you start building more than one binary version of a wheel.  From a distro
>> point of view I only can discourage using such wheels outside a virtual
>> environment, and I would like to see a possibility to easily identify such
>> wheels, something like loading a binary kernel module is tainting the
>> kernel. This way distros can point users to the provider of such wheels.
>>
>
> This sounds like a good idea to me. Do you have a specific idea on how you
> would like to see the feature work ?

Not really yet.  lsmod shows you this information on demand for the running 
kernel.  So maybe you want to add such vendor information into the egg, or in 
the compiled extension, and in the interpreter?  Then give a warning when the 
interpreter is called with a new option and the vendor informations don't match, 
or even error out. Of course interested distros would have to backport such a 
patch to older releases, because that's the target market for the pep.

Matthias