Idea: Tracking ABI additions and changes for better pre-release wheel management

[hugovk (Hugo van Kemenade)]

@EwoutH

One issue is that they are not (simply) installable from PyPI, as far as I understand.

Uploading to PyPI is the best way for you to make your project available for people to test, and to test their projects. Especially if you’re a dependency of a dependency.

@EwoutH

Many packages do have wheels available, but don’t upload them to PyPI, because it isn’t recommended to do so. And it isn’t recommended to do so, since they are not ABI stable.

I recommend it!

@EwoutH

And it isn’t recommended, because there is no way to signal that an wheel is build with a pre-stable Python ABI.

If you’re using a preview Python version, it’s already not recommended for production, so I think the same applies to wheels for preview Python versions: please test, but don’t use use in production. As the 3.13 release manager said:

We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.13 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Tuesday 2024-07-30). Our goal is to have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after 3.13.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.13 as possible during the beta phase.

I think it’s rare for ABI changes during beta. If it does happen, you can make a new release, or upload a new wheel with a build tag.