[Distutils] draft PEP: manylinux1

[Nick Coghlan]

On 27 January 2016 at 22:54, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I followed this up with the ABI folks, and the problem is that the
> elfutils in even DTS 2 is too old to support building libabigail, and
> later versions of the developer toolset (3 & 4) don't support being
> run on CentOS 5.
>
> However, even if the build system is based on CentOS 5, *compatibility
> scanners* like auditwheel can potentially be run on something newer,
> so I've asked if it would work to use the older toolchain to build the
> binaries, but then run the relevant ABI compatibility checks on the
> almost-certainly-newer target distro.
>
> If that's the case, then folks would be able to run a *static*
> abicompat check over a virtualenv including pre-built extensions from
> PyPI and be alerted to ABI compatibility problems, rather than getting
> hard-to-debug segfaults at runtime.

Good news! The toolchain that matters for libabigail based
compatibility scans is the one used to run the scan, *not* the one
used to build the binaries.

This means that even though libabigail itself can't be used on CentOS
5, it *can* be used to check if specific binaries built on CentOS 5
are ABI compatible with your current distro, which is what we actually
want people to be able to do.

Cheers,
Nick.

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