[Distutils] draft PEP: manylinux1

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 6:19 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> OK,
>
> I'll try to stop being emotional here :-)
>
>> 2016-01-22 3:47 GMT+01:00 Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
>> <chris.barker at noaa.gov>:
>> >
>> >  I'm skeptical because I
>> > tried to to that for years for OS-X and it was just too much to do. And
>> > the
>> > infrastructure was there.
>
>
>>
>> My point is that once we have clearly defined best-practices for
>> packaging and convenient tools to build the packages automatically and
>> test that they work as expected (e.g. free hosted CI that support
>> running an old centos-based docker container), I am rather confident
>> that the community will do the work.
>
>
> OK -- here is the emotional part -- I worked for years to try to get support
> to:
>
> "clearly defined best-practices for packaging and convenient tools to build
> the packages automatically"
>
> Primarily for OS-X. I got zero support -- nada -- nothing. Really. A handful
> of people did their own thing to support the community, but no cooperation
> of standards -- each package built was done with a lot of hand work and each
> in its own way. So when i found the conda community working on common tools
> and methods, it was very refreshing.

I hear that :-/. But it feels like there is some momentum building
these days -- before the only people who cared about the scientific
stack + wheels were people doing Mac development, so there are nice
Mac docs like:
   https://github.com/MacPython/wiki/wiki/Wheel-building
and nothing more general. But now we've got Linux and Windows both
ramping up, to the point that I'm having trouble juggling stuff across
the different mailing lists and trying to keep people in the loop.
So... obviously the solution is to create yet another mailing list
:-).

Maybe we need wheel-builders-sig? Their mandate would be to hash out
things like how to build binary-libraries-wrapped-up-in-wheels, share
knowledge about the minutiae of linker behavior on different platforms
(oh god there's so much minutiae), maintain tools like delocate and
auditwheel (and whatever the equivalent will be for windows... and do
we really need 3 different tools?), collect knowledge from where it's
scattered now and put it into the guide at packaging.python.org [1],
etc.? It seems a bit outside distutils-sig's focus in practice, since
this would all be about third-party tools and individual package
authors as opposed to distutils-sig's focus on writing
interoperability PEPs and maintaining the core python.org-affiliated
infrastructure like PyPI / setuptools / pip.

-n

[1] currently the "official guide" to building binary wheels is this
:-): https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/extensions/#publishing-binary-extensions

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