Re: [Distutils] Working toward Linux wheel support

On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Leonardo Rochael Almeida
<leor...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 13 August 2015 at 11:07, Nate Coraor <n...@bx.psu.edu> wrote:>>>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 9:05 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:>>>
[...]
>>> (2) the special hard-coded tag "centos5". (That's what everyone actually>>> uses in practice, right?)>>>>>> The idea here is that we should attempt to install centos5 wheels if more>> specific wheels for the platform aren't available?>>> Just my opinion, but although I'm +1 on Nate's efforts, I'm -1 on both the> standard behavior for installation being the exact platform tag, and an> automatic fallback to cento5.>> IMO, on Linux, the default should always be to opt in to the desired> platform tags.>> We could make it so that the word `default` inside> `binary-compatibility.cfg` means an exact match on the distro version, so> that we could simplify the documentation.>> But I don't want to upgrade to pip and suddenly find myself installing> binary wheels compiled by whomever for whatever platform I have no control> with, even assuming the best of the package builders intentions.>> And I certainly don't want centos5 wheels accidentally installed on my> ubuntu servers unless I very specifically asked for them.>> The tiny pain inflicted by telling users to add a one-line text file in a> very well known location (or two lines, for the added centos5), so that they> can get the benefit of binary wheels on linux, is very small compared to the> pain of repeatable install scripts suddenly behaving differently and> installing binary wheels in systems that were prepared to pay the price of> source installs, including the setting of build environment variables that> correctly tweaked their build process.

I think there are two issues here:

1) You don't want centos5 wheels "accidentally" installed on an ubuntu
server: Fair enough, you're right; we should probably make the "this
wheel should work on pretty much any linux out there" tag be something
that distributors have to explicitly opt into (similar to how they
have to opt into creating universal wheels), rather than having it be
something you could get by just typing 'pip wheel foo' on the right
(wrong) machine.

2) You want it to be the case that if I type 'pip install foo' on a
Linux machine, and pip finds both an sdist and a wheel, where the
wheel is definitely compatible with the current system, then it should
still always prefer the sdist unless configured otherwise: Here I
disagree strongly. This is inconsistent with how things work on every
other platform, it's inconsistent with how pip is being used on Linux
right now with private wheelhouses, and the "tiny pain" of editing a
file in /etc is a huge barrier to new users, many of whom are
uncomfortable editing config files and may not have root access.

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