[Distutils] draft PEP: manylinux1

[Nick Coghlan]

On 22 January 2016 at 22:07, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> However, system vendors will often be a lot faster with updates
> than package authors, simply because it's their business model,
> so as user you will want to benefit from those updates and
> not have to rely on the package author to ship new wheel files.

This is true for the subset of packages monitored by distro security
response teams, but there's a *lot* of software not currently packaged
for Linux distros that never will be as more attention is given to the
"rebuild the world on demand" model that elastic cloud computing and
fast internet connections enable.

My fundamental concern is that if a package author publishes a distro
dependent wheel file, pip attempts to install it, and it doesn't work,
the reaction for many users is going to be "Python packaging is
broken", not "the packaging of this particular package is broken".

However, moving the "generic linux wheels are ignored by default"
behaviour to pip-the-client, rather than enforcing it as a restriction
on PyPI uploads could definitely be a reasonable alternative way of
addressing that concern.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia