Where we are on manylinux2010 (and how that relates to manylinux2014)

Packaging
4

From the perspective of someone who’s done a little bit of packaging for PyPI (only a couple of packages, but one of them has compiled code with complicated library and data dependencies), I think the remaining incomplete items from the tracking issue will be really important for takeup. Here they are, for reference:

Nominate a timeline and/or “percentage of PyPI downloads by manylinux2010 compatible installers” for switching the default build environment and auditwheel output to manylinux2010
Reword the “not yet widely supported” caveat from the platform compatibility tagging page to instead specify the minimum required versions of auditwheel to emit manylinux2010 packages, and pip and pipenv to install them
Option to target manylinux2010 instead of manylinux1 in [various build utilities]

I’m also seriously missing a packager-oriented explanation of what you get and what you give up when you switch from 1 to 2010. I vaguely understand that you get somewhat newer compilers and shell tools (which?) and a build environment that doesn’t have to be hacked to run on modern host environments and is still receiving security patches (at least for a little while); is there more? I also vaguely understand that there is some set of old Linux distributions on which 1 wheels will work but 2010 wheels won’t; knowing just how old those are and how widespread they still are would really help people decide whether their package’s users will be inconvenienced by a change. And is there any other reason not to switch?

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