Adding support for adequately tagging AIX (pep425) to support distributed wheels

Michael <[email protected]> Mon, 19 Aug 2019 09:53:25 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.python.distutils.devel,gmane.comp.python.ideas
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Goal - using wheels rather than RPM and/or installp formats for
distributing binary modules

Why bother?
One reason (there are likely more) - using wheels means packages/modules
can be loaded in a virtualenv
rather than require they are first loaded in the system environment
using installp/rpm/yum (with root authority). This alone has been reason
enough for me to do the research.

Introduction
The use of pip and wheels is commonplace in the worlds of Linux, macOS
and Windows.
Not so for AIX. Not because it couldn't be commonplace.

The current situation for AIX is comparable to the initial issue Linux
was facing
when PEP513 was written:

"Currently, distribution of binary Python extensions for Windows and OS
X is straightforward. ...
For Linux, the situation is much more delicate. ...
Build tools using PEP 425 platform tags [3] do not track information
about the particular Linux distribution or installed system libraries,
and instead assign all wheels the too-vague linux_i686 or linux_x86_64
tags. Because of this ambiguity, ..."

The root cause for the *ambiguity* that Linux systems had is not the
ambiguity that AIX faces.
AIX has provided a consistent way to "tag" it's runtime environment
since at least 2007 (AIX 5.3 TL7).
Since that time IBM AIX has also *guaranteed* binary compatibility for
migration of applications
from old to new OS levels.

I would like to see these tags added - at a minimum that they can be
retrieved by something such as sysconfig.get_var('AIC_BLD_TAG'). It
would be "nice" to see sysconfig.get_platform() updated to include these
values from the running system.

Further, while pip related tools can add the "bitness" to the platform
tags I would like to see something added to the AIX get_platform() tag
(b32, ppc, aix32), (b64, ppc64, aix64) for 32 and 64 bit operations,
respectively - as that is a "running" environment attribute. Open to
other ideas on what the bitness tag should be. IMHO - anything is better
than nothing. Maybe this could be considered a bug rather than as a new
feature.

Thank you for your feedback.

Michael

--
Distutils-SIG mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/distutils-sig.python.org/
Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/DVHVSY7HFAK6B6BASXER2FUGXZN567UY/

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 488 B)