[Distutils] draft PEP: manylinux1

[Paul Moore]

On 22 January 2016 at 11:55, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> From the point of view of future-proofing PEP 513 against having such
>> an alternative available in the future, the main question that would
>> need to be considered is how tools would decide download priority
>> between a distro-specific wheel, an integrated linux wheel, and a
>> linux wheel with bundled dependencies.
>
> I think that this could probably just be left up to the individual tools? We
> already have to decide between multiple candidate wheels, this is just another
> thing to look at.

The compatibility tag spec (PEP 425) does note that choosing between
candidate implementations is a tool-specific implementation detail (at
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0425/#id14). It seems to me that
this simply comes under the point of "It is recommended that
installers try to choose the most feature complete built distribution
available (the one most specific to the installation environment)..."

At the moment, the process is effective but rudimentary (we don't
really expect more than one compatible wheel that isn't pure-python).
If people start seeing multiple potential wheels and want to have the
option to control the priorities, it's probably better to develop a
solution via pip feature requests, and when things stabilise, document
the solution in a standard if it's appropriate (i.e., it's *not* just
pip configuration options).

Paul