[Numpy-discussion] Should I use pip install numpy in linux?

[Robert McGibbon]

> Both Anaconda and Canopy build on a base default Linux system so that
> the built binaries will work on many Linux systems.

I think the base linux system is CentOS 5, and from my experience, it
seems like
this approach
has worked very well. Those packages are compatible with all essentially
all Linuxes that are
more recent than CentOS 5 (which is ancient). I have not heard of anyone
complaining that the
packages they install through conda don't work on their CentOS 4 or Ubuntu
6.06 box. I assume
Python / pip is probably used on a wider diversity of linux flavors than
conda is, so I'm sure that
binaries built on CentOS 5 won't work for absolutely _every_ linux user,
but it does seem to
cover the substantial majority of linux users.

Building redistributable linux binaries that work across a large number of
distros and distro
versions is definitely tricky. If you run ``python setup.py bdist_wheel``
on your Fedora Rawhide
box, you can't really expect the wheel to work for too many other linux
users. So given that, I
can see why PyPI would want to be careful about accepting Linux wheels.

But it seems like, if they make the upload something like

```
twine upload numpy-1.9.2-cp27-none-linux_x86_64.whl \
    --yes-yes-i-know-this-is-dangerous-but-i-know-what-i'm-doing
```

that this would potentially be able to let packages like numpy serve their
linux
users better without risking too much junk being uploaded to PyPI.

-Robert


On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 11:27 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov>
> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 1:58 PM, Robert McGibbon <rmcgibbo at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm not sure if this is the right path for numpy or not,
> >
> >
> > probably not -- AFAICT, the PyPa folks aren't interested in solving teh
> > problems we have in the scipy community -- we can tweak around the edges,
> > but we wont get there without a commitment to really solve the issues --
> and
> > if pip did that, it would essentially be conda -- non one wants to
> > re-impliment conda.
>
> Well - as the OP was implying, it really should not be too difficult.
>
> We (here in Berkeley) have discussed how to do this for Linux,
> including (Nathaniel mainly) what would be sensible for pypi to do, in
> terms of platform labels.
>
> Both Anaconda and Canopy build on a base default Linux system so that
> the built binaries will work on many Linux systems.
>
> At the moment, Linux wheels have the platform tag of either linux_i686
> (32-bit) or linux_x86_64 - example filenames:
>
> numpy-1.9.2-cp27-none-linux_i686.whl
> numpy-1.9.2-cp27-none-linux_x86_64.whl
>
> Obviously these platform tags are rather useless, because they don't
> tell you very much about whether this wheel will work on your own
> system.
>
> If we started building Linux wheels on a base system like that of
> Anaconda or Canopy we might like another platform tag that tells you
> that this wheel is compatible with a wide range of systems.   So the
> job of negotiating with distutils-sig is trying to find a good name
> for this base system - we thought that 'manylinux' was a good one -
> and then put in a pull request to pip to recognize 'manylinux' as
> compatible when running pip install from a range of Linux systems.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matthew
> _______________________________________________
> NumPy-Discussion mailing list
> NumPy-Discussion at scipy.org
> https://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20160108/9a9b961f/attachment.html>