I’m pleased to announce that there is now a candidate docker image to build manylinux2010 compatible wheels for 64-bit architectures. You can get it by running:
docker pull quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_x86_64
manylinux2010, defined by PEP 571, is the successor to the manylinux1 tag. Both are designed to support a wide range of recent Linux distributions, by relying on the forwards compatibility of a specific set of system libraries. By building against old versions of these libraries, the resulting wheels should work with all newer versions. Manylinux1 used the versions of libraries from CentOS 5, while manylinux2010 is based on CentOS 6, first released c. 2010. This should make it a bit easier to build with, while still supporting all mainstream distributions still in widespread use. See the next manylinux specification thread for discussion of future manylinux tags.
The docker images provide a convenient way to build packages against the necessary old versions of libraries. Please do try out the new manylinux2010_x86_64 image, but as with anything new, you might want to wait before making critical infrastructure rely on it.
pip, PyPI and the auditwheel tool should all already support manylinux2010 tags, so it’s hopefully practical to publish wheels with it now.
For now, there is only a docker image for x86_64 (64 bit). The PEP defines an i686 (32 bit) flavour of the tag as well; if you need to build 32-bit manylinux wheels, please consider contributing!