Re: [Distutils] Proposal: using /etc/os-release in the "platform tag" definition for wheel files

+1 to the idea in general. as well.

Here is another use case to motivate distro-aware platform tags for
linux wheels: speeding up continuous integration.

Many Python projects related to the SciPy ecosystem by sharing use the
following rackspace cloud storage container to mutualize build
artifacts:

http://wheels.scikit-image.org/

This makes it really easy to setup build chains to test libraries with
against recent (or even development) version of they dependencies that
cannot be apt-get installed on travis hosts for instance. Building
from source is often not an option for a project that have a
dependency on scipy for instance, the scipy build time itself would
eat most of the travis job allowed time and would not leave enough
time. And it would be a complete waste of resource to rebuild scipy
over and over again.

Unfortunately, all the wheels you find on
http://wheels.scikit-image.org with the "linux_x86_64" are only
expected to work on the Ubuntu Precise platform (which is used by
travis).

This ambiguous platform tag is really annoying:

- it prevents people who would like to setup CI for other linux
platforms (e.g. docker based CI engines that would test wheels on
redhat or centos) to share the same distribution infrastructure,
- the day travis changes its base distro we will have no way to detect
which wheels were built on the old distro and which wheels are built
on the newer version of the distro.

Note that those wheels are not meant to be used by our end-users, only
by CI tools for testing or by developers who would like to quickly
reproduce without having to rebuild everything from scratch.

If the experiment show that such distro tagged wheels are actually as
stable as their are supposed too (which can be mostly tested via CI),
then we could discuss later about the opportunity to distribute Linux
wheels on PyPI for the end users but to me this is not a priority at
all.

-- 
Olivier
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