[Distutils] PEP for dependencies on libraries like BLAS (was: Re: Working toward Linux wheel support)

[Nick Coghlan]

[Catching up on distutils-sig after travel]

On 13 August 2015 at 16:08, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> It seems like a reasonable effort at solving this problem, and I guess
> there are probably some people somewhere that have this problem, but
> my concern is that I don't actually know any of those people. The
> developers I know instead have the problem of, they want to be able to
> provide a small finite number of binaries (ideally six binaries per
> Python version: {32 bit, 64 bit} * {windows, osx, linux}) that
> together will Just Work on 99% of end-user systems. And that's the
> problem that Enthought, Continuum, etc., have been solving for years,
> and which wheels already mostly solve on windows and osx, so it seems
> like a reasonable goal to aim for. But I don't see how this PEP gets
> us any closer to that.

The key benefit from my perspective is that tools like pyp2rpm, conda
skeleton, the Debian Python packaging tools, etc, will be able to
automatically generate full dependency sets automatically from
upstream Python metadata.

At the moment that's manual work which needs to be handled
independently for each binary ecosystem, but there's no reason it has
to be that way - we can do a better job of defining the source
dependencies, and then hook into release-monitoring.org to
automatically rebuild the downstream binaries (including adding new
external dependencies if needed) whenever new upstream releases are
published.

Cheers,
Nick.

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