[Distutils] draft PEP: manylinux1

[Nick Coghlan]

On 26 January 2016 at 16:49, Robert T. McGibbon <rmcgibbo at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 10:29 PM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
> <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>>
>> Given that we're starting now ( not a year or two ago) and it'll take
>> a while for it to really catch on, we should go CentOS 6 ( or
>> equivalent ) now?
>>
>> CentOS5 was released in 2007! That is a pretty long time in computing.
>
> I understand the concern, but I think we should follow the lead of the other
> projects
> that have been doing portable linux binaries (holy build box, traveling
> ruby, portable-pypy,
> firefox, enthought, continuum) for some time, all based on CentOS 5. At some
> point things
> like C++17 support will be important and I agree that we'll need to update
> the base spec,
> but in the meantime, I don't see this as a problem where we should be the
> first mover.

I was discussing this with some of the folks that are responsible for
defining the RHEL (and hence CentOS) ABI, and they pointed out that
the main near term advantage of targeting CentOS 6 over CentOS 5 is
that it means that it would be possible to analyse binaries built that
way with the libabigail tools, including abicompat:
https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/abicompat.html

If I understand the problem correctly, the CentOS 5 gcc toolchain is
old enough that it simply doesn't emit the info libabigail needs in
order to work.

So if we went down the CentOS 6+ path, it should make it possible to
take binaries built on the reference environment and use abicompat to
check them against libraries from another distro, and vice-versa.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia