The next manylinux specification

[njs (Nathaniel J. Smith)]

@dustin

satisfying maintainers desire to determine if they can build compatible distributions without just saying “auditwheel will tell you if you did it right or not”?

Everything I’m proposing is about standardizing the things we’re already doing, and that we know work. Auditwheel is already the most accurate, useful, and up-to-date record of how to build compatible wheels on Linux, because it’s what maintainers actually use. I’m pretty sure there have been fixes to the spec in auditwheel that we forgot to merge back into PEP 513, or where the PEP 513 update came later as an afterthought.

@dustin

This sounds like we’re just pushing the “specification” into auditwheel, where it would be a) more difficult for interested parties to determine what the rules are, exactly, and b) more work for auditwheel maintainers (who are few and far between). It just wouldn’t require a PEP.

In practice, the specification already lives in auditwheel, so there’s no additional maintenance burden. It’s true that reading the rules would require reading some code, but in practice (a) the code is guaranteed to be accurate and up to date, unlike the PEP, (b) you’re still better off than on Windows or macOS, where the rules aren’t written down at all…

@jjhelmus

For a specific example, Debian 8 (Jessie) ships with glibc 2.19 and gcc 4.9.2. Wheels produced by a system running this distribution would be labeled with the manylinux_glibc_2_19_x86_64 tag and the gcc toolchain would include symbols with maximum versions of CXXABI_1.3.8 and GLIBCXX_3.4.20. Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty) also ships with glibc 2.19 but the gcc version is 4.8.2 which contains maximum version symbols of CXXABI_1.3.7 and GLIBCXX_3.4.18.

A manylinux_glibc_2_19_x86_64 tag would mean that the wheel is compatible with all mainstream distros using glibc 2.19+ on x86-64.

Ubuntu 14.04 is a mainstream distro using glibc 2.19+ on x86-64.

Therefore, to get a manylinux_glibc_2_19_x86_64 tag, you need to be compatible with Ubuntu 14.04.

Therefore, a random wheel built on Debian 8 probably does not qualify for the manylinux_glibc_2_19_x86_64 tag.

A random wheel built on Ubuntu 14.04 might qualify for the tag, but to be certain we’d have to first do some research to check whether there were any distros shipping glibc 2.19 with even older versions of gcc. And of course we’d also need to vendor any necessary libraries, etc.