[Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

[Robert Collins]

On 14 August 2015 at 13:25, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 7:07 AM, Nate Coraor <nate at bx.psu.edu> wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 9:05 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> From my reading of what the Enthought and Continuum folks were saying
>>> about how they are successfully distributing binaries across different
>>> distributions, it sounds like the additional piece that would take this from
>>> a interesting experiment to basically-immediately-usable would be to teach
>>> pip that if no binary-compatibility.cfg is provided, then it should assume
>>> by default that the compatible systems whose wheels should be installed are:
>>> (1) the current system's exact tag,
>>
>> This should already be the case - the default tag will no longer be
>> -linux_x86_64, it'd be linux_x86_64_distro_version.
>>
>>>
>>> (2) the special hard-coded tag "centos5". (That's what everyone actually
>>> uses in practice, right?)
>>
>> The idea here is that we should attempt to install centos5 wheels if more
>> specific wheels for the platform aren't available?
>
> Yes.
>
> Or more generally, we should pick some common baseline build
> environment such that we're pretty sure wheels built there can run on
> 99% of end-user systems and give this environment a name. (Doesn't
> have to be "centos5", though IIUC CentOS 5 is what people are using
> for this baseline build environment right now.) That way when distros
> catch up and start providing binary-compatibility.cfg files, we can
> give tell them that this is an environment that they should try to
> support because it's what everyone is using, and to kick start that
> process we should assume it as a default until the distros do catch
> up. This has two benefits: it means that these wheels would actually
> become useful in some reasonable amount of time, and as a bonus, it
> would provide a clear incentive for those rare distros that *aren't*
> compatible to document that by starting to provide a
> binary-compatibility.cfg.

Sounds like a reinvention of LSB, which is still a thing I think, but
really didn't take the vendor world by storm.

-Rob

-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud