[Distutils] draft PEP: manylinux2

Robin Becker robin at reportlab.com
Wed Feb 7 04:58:08 EST 2018


On 07/02/2018 05:21, Alex Walters wrote:
> 
...........
> This is a really good point.  Since pip is the main interface to packages
> for end users anyways, we can call it manylinux8675309 and it wouldn't
> really matter to users - the name only really matters to package
> maintainers, not users.  And because of that, manylinux2010, manylinux2014,
> etc makes more sense.  A package maintainer is expected to be more educated
> about these matters, and that naming scheme is more useful to them.  "Whats
> the oldest linux system my code will run on?" is a very likely question a
........
I dispute the fact that package maintainers should be more educated about these matters. The package maintainer usually knows 
about one or a few packages (in my case reportlab etc). I know very little about the architectures and platforms that people are 
using with reportlab today. Nor do I know (or need to know) about multiple linux distributions and what libraries they supported 
and in what year.

I do agree that the name of the available packages shouldn't really matter. Provided there is information in the name that allows 
the requesting pip to decide on the appropriate package to use (or lack thereof) that should suffice. Is pip clever enough to 
decide this or will we have to rely on the mysterious _manylinux module?
-- 
Robin Becker


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