What to do about GPUs? (and the built distributions that support them)

[oscarbenjamin]

@msarahan

@brettcannon

For me the question is who chooses what code to run and when does it run?

I think I covered it above, but to reiterate: no one has come up with a plan that avoids needing the end user to make an explicit decision to install a “plugin.” This is good from the standpoint of someone who wants more control of what their computer does, but bad from the standpoint of publishers who want the absolute lowest barrier to entry for their users.

The wheel selector suggestion was intended to make the process automatic much like the the prior selector package idea that it references. It was pointed out though that in many situations there is a need for users to control the selection.

Just having variant wheels and an explicit way to select between them sort of seems like a prerequisite to designing anything that would give automatic wheel selection so discussion moved off in that direction. I think it is very much the case though that there needs to be a way to handle this automatically for most users.