On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 6:31 PM, Robert Collins
<robe...@robertcollins.net> wrote:
> On 14 August 2015 at 13:25, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:>> On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 7:07 AM, Nate Coraor <n...@bx.psu.edu> wrote:>>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 9:05 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:>>>>>>>> From my reading of what the Enthought and Continuum folks were saying>>>> about how they are successfully distributing binaries across different>>>> distributions, it sounds like the additional piece that would take this from>>>> a interesting experiment to basically-immediately-usable would be to teach>>>> pip that if no binary-compatibility.cfg is provided, then it should assume>>>> by default that the compatible systems whose wheels should be installed are:>>>> (1) the current system's exact tag,>>>>>> This should already be the case - the default tag will no longer be>>> -linux_x86_64, it'd be linux_x86_64_distro_version.>>>>>>>>>>> (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?>>>> Yes.>>>> Or more generally, we should pick some common baseline build>> environment such that we're pretty sure wheels built there can run on>> 99% of end-user systems and give this environment a name. (Doesn't>> have to be "centos5", though IIUC CentOS 5 is what people are using>> for this baseline build environment right now.) That way when distros>> catch up and start providing binary-compatibility.cfg files, we can>> give tell them that this is an environment that they should try to>> support because it's what everyone is using, and to kick start that>> process we should assume it as a default until the distros do catch>> up. This has two benefits: it means that these wheels would actually>> become useful in some reasonable amount of time, and as a bonus, it>> would provide a clear incentive for those rare distros that *aren't*>> compatible to document that by starting to provide a>> binary-compatibility.cfg.>> Sounds like a reinvention of LSB, which is still a thing I think, but> really didn't take the vendor world by storm.
Yeah, I've been carefully not mentioning LSB because LSB is a disaster
:-). But, I think this is different.
IIUC, the problem with LSB is that it's trying to make it possible for
big enterprise software vendors to stop saying "This RDBMS is
certified to work on RHEL 6" and start saying "This RDBMS is certified
to work on any distribution that meets the LSB criteria". But in
practice this creates more risk and work for the vendor, while not
actually solving any real problem -- if a customer is spending $$$$ on
some enterprise database then they might as well throw in an extra $$
for a RHEL license, so the customers don't care, so the vendor doesn't
either. And the folks building free software like Postgres don't care
either because the distros do the support for them. So the LSB
continues to limp along through the ISO process because just enough
managers have been convinced that it *ought* to be useful that they
continue to throw some money at it, and hey, it's probably useful to
some people sometimes, just not very many people very often.
We, on the other hand, are trying to solve a real problem that our
users feel keenly (lots of people want to be able to distribute some
little binary python extension in a way that just works for a wide
range of users), and the proposed mechanism for solving this problem
is not "let's form an ISO committee and hire contractors to write a
Grand Unified Test Suite", it's codifying an existing working solution
in the form of a wiki page or PEP or something.
Of course if you have an alternative proposal than I'm all ears :-).
-n
P.S.: since probably not everyone on the mailing list has been
following Linux inside baseball for decades, some context...:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb/download
https://lwn.net/Articles/152580/
http://udrepper.livejournal.com/8511.html
(Last two links are from 2005, I can't really say how accurate they
still are in details but they do describe some of the structural
reasons why the LSB has not been massively popular)
--
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org
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