[Distutils] GCC versions and binary egg names

[Chris Withers]

P.J. Eby wrote:
> Egg binaries aren't a great idea on Linux; 

If more packages were statically linked they would be :-/

> they were mainly intended for 
> Windows and Mac, where the architectures are uniform and working 
> compilers aren't just an apt-get or yum away.

On linux, it's the build rather than runtime dependencies that are the 
pain... Also, a lot of the scipy-ish packages (and lxml) often having 
confusing and brittle build requirements.

> (Ironically, this is a side effect of eggs being invented *before* 
> easy_install; if I'd thought of easy_install *first*, I might not've 
> bothered with eggs (as a distribution format) at all.  Certainly, sdists 
> don't add a lot of installation overhead except on compiler-less 
> platforms.)

Agree, where the build dependencies are simple :-/

> Incidentally, if you look way, way back in the distutils-sig archives, 
> you can see where I first raised the question of platform strings and 
> addressing some of these issues, but at the time nobody was interested.  

People are never interested, until they have the problem themselves or 
are in a position where they can bikeshed on a topic ;-)

> Since then, the topic gets raised periodically, but there has never been 
> anyone with enough of both interest and knowledge to put together a 
> concrete proposal for overhauling platform strings on *nix platforms.
> 

I lack on the latter and time for the former...

Chris