[Distutils] heads-up on a plot to bring linux wheels to pypi

[Nathaniel Smith]

Hi all,

Just wanted give distutils-sig a heads-up that there seems to be some
momentum gathering around a plot to bring linux wheels to pypi:

  https://github.com/manylinux/manylinux

Basically the idea is to define a standard baseline linux environment
(available libraries + version numbers + ABI of these), give it a name
(for now, "manylinux"), and then provide tools to build wheels against
this environment, teach pip how to recognize that the system it's on
conforms to the environment, and then convince pypi to start accepting
wheels with this as a platform tag :-). And if we carefully define the
baseline environment based on the experiences of the popular
scientific python distros (Continuum's Anaconda + Enthought's Canopy)
we can be highly confident that essentially all desktop + server linux
distros will be compatible with these wheels.

This strategy is orthogonal to the more ambitious efforts to define an
interface between wheels and the platform package manager; they can
proceed in parallel and potentially complement each other. The goal
here is just to get linux up to feature parity with windows and osx.

Status:
- we have a draft policy
- there's a cool tool for scanning wheels and checking whether they
conform to the policy: https://github.com/manylinux/auditwheel
- there's a draft docker image to make it easy to build such wheels
(https://github.com/manylinux/manylinux/pull/2)

To do:
- bikeshed the name ("manylinux" was picked after about 2 minutes of
discussion so as to get started. maybe "genericlinux" would be better?
I dunno.)
- build some test wheels
- write a proper PEP
- convince pip and pypi maintainers that this is a good idea ;-)

-n

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