[Distutils] [final version?] PEP 513 - A Platform Tag for Portable Linux Built Distributions

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 3:37 PM, Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On 30.01.2016 00:29, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I think this is ready for pronouncement now -- thanks to everyone for
>> all their feedback over the last few weeks!
>
>
> I don't think so.  I am biased because I'm the maintainer for Python in
> Debian/Ubuntu.

Thank you for your work! I've been using Debian/Ubuntu as my sole
desktop and for Python development since ~2000, so it's very much
appreciated :-).

> So I would like to have some feedback from maintainers of
> Python in other Linux distributions (Nick, no, you're not one of these).
>
> The proposal just takes some environment and declares that as a standard.
> So everybody wanting to supply these wheels basically has to use this
> environment.

Yeah, pretty much. The spec says "we define the ABI by reference to
this environment" and if you can find some other ways to build these
wheels without using that environment, then go for it, but in practice
I doubt there's much point. CentOS 5 is widely available, free (in all
senses), and works. Even if it does require one to use weird tools
like "yum" and "rpm" whose UIs are constantly confusing me and make no
sense whatsoever [1].

[1] i.e., they aren't identical to apt / dpkg.

> Without giving any details, without giving any advise how to
> produce such wheels in other environments.

There isn't a lot of end-user-focused documentation in the PEP itself,
it's true, but that's because that's how PEPs work.

Here's an example project for building manylinux1 wheels using
Travis-CI (which runs some version of Ubuntu):

  https://github.com/pypa/python-manylinux-demo

Obviously this is all still a work in progress ("latest commit: 40
minutes ago"). Better docs are coming :-)

> Without giving any hints how such
> wheels may be broken with newer environments.

What kind of hints are you suggesting?

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org