[Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 July 2015 at 04:37, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 July 2015 at 18:37, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
>> sure -- but isn't that use-case already supported by wheel -- define your
>> own wheelhouse that has the ABI you know you need, and point pip to it.
>
> I presume the issue is wanting to have a single shared wheelhouse for
> a (presumably limited) number of platforms. So being able to specify a
> (completely arbitrary) local platform name at build and install time
> sounds like a viable option.

While supporting multiple distros in a single repo is indeed one use
case (and the one that needs to be solved to allow distribution via
PyPI), the problem I'm interested in isn't the "success case" where a
precompiled Linux wheel stays nicely confined to the specific
environment it was built to target, but rather the failure mode where
a file "escapes".

Currently, there's nothing in a built Linux wheel file to indicate its
*intended* target environment, which makes debugging ABI mismatches
incredibly difficult. By contrast, if the wheel filename says "Fedora
22" and you're trying to run it on "Ubuntu 14.04" and getting a
segfault, you have a pretty good hint as to the likely cause of your
problem.

Cheers,
Nick.

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