[Distutils] Any thoughts on supporting e.g. Alpine Linux? (was: PEP 571: Any further manylinux2010 concerns or questions?

[Paul Moore]

On 2 April 2018 at 17:45, Trishank Kuppusamy
<trishank.kuppusamy at datadoghq.com> wrote:
>> That said, if there were to be a significant growth in non-manylinux Linux
>> wheels on PyPI, I'd expect them to be for the official Docker Inc base
>> Python images, which are Alpine based, and hence can't use the glibc-based
>> manylinux binaries.
>
> I think this is a good idea, especially given that manylinux1 and
> manylinux2010 wheels won't work on the official Docker image for Python.
> What does everyone else think?

My (mostly uninformed...) opinion is that having a mechanism to
publish wheels for alternative compatibility classes (I hesitate to
say "user defined" or "adhoc", because it implies too little
structure, but I'm thinking in terms of something similar to
manylinux, but without the need for a formal standards process) would
be useful, because it would allow people to handle emerging standards
like Alpine Linux for Docker, without going through a standardisation
process, a pip/pypi release cycle, etc. I've no feel for how likely
Alpine Linux is to still be as important as it currently is 12 months
from now (maybe Docker will switch to an alternative base, who knows?)
but we should be giving the community a means to react to such trends
in a timely manner.

Paul