[Distutils] heads-up on a plot to bring linux wheels to pypi

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 2:19 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 January 2016 at 20:12, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 14 January 2016 at 15:55, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>>> - build some test wheels
>>> - write a proper PEP
>>> - convince pip and pypi maintainers that this is a good idea ;-)
>>
>> While I've historically advocated against the idea of defining our own
>> "Linux platform ABI" subset, the fact that Enthought and Continuum are
>> successfully distributing pre-built binaries through the simple "use
>> CentOS 5.11" approach seems promising.
>>
>> In terms of non-scientific packages, the main group I'd suggest
>> getting in touch with is pycryptography, as we'll probably want to
>> baseline a more recent version of OpenSSL than the one in CentOS 5.11.
>
> Ah, looking at https://github.com/manylinux/auditwheel, I see anything
> linking to OpenSSL would fail the platform audit, at least for the
> current draft policy. That also seems like a potentially reasonable
> approach (although it could lead to complaints about "Why doesn't
> project <X> offer a wheel file?")

Yeah, it's very unfortunate, that's exactly the library that you'd
like to be able to depend on, so we checked specifically. But it turns
out that openssl has broken ABI over the relevant time-period, so
there's no choice, you can't rely on the system version and have to
statically link :-(.

Though I guess this is no worse than than if you want to distribute a
wheel that needs openssl on Windows.

-n

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