[Numpy-discussion] reducing effort spent on wheel builds?

[Charles R Harris]

I spent so much time updating the wheels builds to 64 bit BLAS mostly
because


   - I needed to actually understand how multibuild worked (and docs are
   minimal).
   - I don't know powershell (and docs are hard to find).
   - I don't know azure works at a lower level (and docs are hard to find).


And I thought it would all be drop in easy :) What that indicates to me is
that we could use a build expert and simpler infrastructure. Anaconda no
doubt has people far more knowledgeable about such matters than I am.

As to the twitter thread, what is the proposal(s)? I'm perfectly happy to
leave support for more exotic platforms to people who have the hardware and
make use of it, but no doubt such people have the opposite problem of not
knowing much about NumPy.

Chuck

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 4:22 AM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey all,
>
> This whole thread is quite interesting:
> https://twitter.com/zooba/status/1415440484181417998. Given how much
> effort we are spending on really niche wheel builds, I’m wondering if we
> should just draw a line somewhere:
>
>    - we do what we do now for the main platforms: Windows, Linux (x86,
>    aarch64), macOS, *but*:
>    - no wheels for ppc64le
>    - no wheels for Alpine Linux
>    - no wheels for PyPy
>    - no wheels for Raspberry Pi, AIX or whatever other niche thing comes
>    next.
>    - drop 32-bit Linux in case it is becoming an annoyance.
>
> This is not an actual proposal (yet) and I should sleep on this some more,
> but I've seen Chuck and Matti burn a lot of time on the numpy-wheels repo
> again recently, and I've done the same for SciPy. The situation is not very
> sustainable and needs a rethink.
>
> The current recipe is "someone who cares about a platform writes a PEP,
> then pip/wheel add a platform tag for it (very little work), and then the
> maintainers of each Python package are now responsible for wheel builds (a
> ton of work)". Most of these platforms have package managers, which are all
> more capable than pip et al., and if they don't then wheels can be hosted
> elsewhere (example: https://www.piwheels.org/). And then there's Conda,
> Nix, Spack, etc. too of course.
>
> Drawing a line somewhere distributes the workload, where packagers who
> care about some platform and have better tools at hand can do the
> packaging, and maintainers can go do something with more impact like write
> new code or review PRs.
>
> <end of brainwave>
>
> Cheers,
> Ralf
>
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