[Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

[Robert Collins]

On 14 August 2015 at 14:14, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
...>
> Of course if you have an alternative proposal than I'm all ears :-).

Yeah :)

So, I want to dedicate some time to contributing to this discussion
meaningfully, but I can't for the next few weeks - Jury duty, Kiwi
PyCon and polishing up the PEP's I'm already committed to...

I think the approach of being able to ask the *platform* for things
needed to build-or-use known artifacts is going to enable a bunch of
different answers in this space. I'm much more enthusiastic about that
than doing anything that ends up putting PyPI in competition with the
distribution space.

My criteria for success are:

- there's *a* migration path from what we have today to what we
propose. Doesn't have to be good, just exist.

 - authors of scipy, numpy, cryptography etc can upload binary wheels
for *linux, Mac OSX and Windows 32/64 in a safe and sane way

 - we don't need to do things like uploading wheels containing
non-Python shared libraries, nor upload statically linked modules


In fact, I think uploading regular .so files is just a huge heartache
waiting to happen, so I'm almost inclined to add:

 -  we don't support uploading external non-Python libraries [ without
prejuidice for changing our minds in the future]


There was a post that referenced a numpy ABI, dunno if it was in this
thread - I need to drill down into that, because I don't understand
why thats not a regular version resolution problem,unlike the Python
ABI, which pip can't install [and shouldn't be able to!]

-Rob


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