[Distutils] draft PEP: manylinux1

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 4:37 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 1:37 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> I will make sure to let the manylinux effort know when we decide to move
>> to Centos6 as the base system.
>>
>
> Thanks -- do you have any idea how many of your customers are running
> systems that old?
>
> i.e. have you stuck with CentOS5 because of actual customer demand as
> opposed to  uncertainty or inertia?
>

As mentioned by others before, Centos5 is a good way to ensure we link
against an old glibc (and few other key libraries, mostly X11-related).
That's really the main thing, as in general, you want to depend on the
system as little as possible when deploying binaries on Linux. Centos 6
uses glibc 2.12, which is newer than debian 6 and ubuntu 10.04 versions.
Even if debian 6 is still old, we see it on systems, and ubuntu 10.04 LTS
is definitely still out there in companies, even if officially unsupported.
And unsupported old versions of OS are used much more often than you may
think in enterprise (can't give names but companies anyone has heard of
still rely a lot on windows XP).

So now, one could argue that it is not the community's job to tackle old
OS, and they would be right, but:

1. Updating to e.g. 6 does not help that much, as the basic components
(compiler toolchain) are still old.
2. Updating the toolchain even on centos 5 is quite easy thanks to the
devtoolset effort.

The main argument against using centos 5 is GUI-related components, as the
old fontconfig/glib (the GTK one, not Gnu libc) are a problem. But those
are a tiny minority of what people do with python nowadays, and they
require a lot of work to get right.

David


>
> -CHB
>
>
>
> --
>
> Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
> Oceanographer
>
> Emergency Response Division
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> Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
>
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