The packaging tool auditwheel "is a command line tool to facilitate the creation of Python wheel packages for Linux (containing pre-compiled binary extensions) that are compatible with a wide variety of Linux distributions" and key standards. It can inspect a wheel, checking whether it is standards-compliant. It can also repair a wheel. If a wheel depends on libraries that are not on the system, it can rewrite that wheel and inject libraries needed, parsing and rewriting ELF data. It can also repair the relevant manylinux tag(s) on a wheel.
However, no such utility exists on Windows, and so package maintainers on Windows face trouble creating wheels and debugging their packages. And the similar utility for Mac OS does not share auditwheel's code and user interface.
Therefore, developers would like to add Windows and Mac support to auditwheel. Porting auditwheel to Windows would make it much easier to make Windows wheels, and porting it to macOS would reduce duplication on the packaging maintainers' side, and reduce the proliferation of quirky tools that individual package maintainers need to learn about.
A simpler and more consistent cross-platform workflow will make it easier for package maintainers to use generic off-the-shelf automation. More maintainers will be able to leverage available automation (GitHub Actions, Travis CI, Azure pipelines, and potentially a future PyPI wheel-building service) to speed up releases and reduce grunt work. Also, this will especially be useful for scientific programmers, since they often create Python applications or libraries that include binaries written in other languages, and wheel distributions of those packages are prone to complication.
We need funding for backend development, hardware, testing, continuous integration platform services, technical writing for end users, project management, and community outreach.
Ref: https://github.com/pypa/auditwheel
The packaging tool auditwheel "is a command line tool to facilitate the creation of Python wheel packages for Linux (containing pre-compiled binary extensions) that are compatible with a wide variety of Linux distributions" and key standards. It can inspect a wheel, checking whether it is standards-compliant. It can also repair a wheel. If a wheel depends on libraries that are not on the system, it can rewrite that wheel and inject libraries needed, parsing and rewriting ELF data. It can also repair the relevant manylinux tag(s) on a wheel.
However, no such utility exists on Windows, and so package maintainers on Windows face trouble creating wheels and debugging their packages. And the similar utility for Mac OS does not share auditwheel's code and user interface.
Therefore, developers would like to add Windows and Mac support to auditwheel. Porting auditwheel to Windows would make it much easier to make Windows wheels, and porting it to macOS would reduce duplication on the packaging maintainers' side, and reduce the proliferation of quirky tools that individual package maintainers need to learn about.
A simpler and more consistent cross-platform workflow will make it easier for package maintainers to use generic off-the-shelf automation. More maintainers will be able to leverage available automation (GitHub Actions, Travis CI, Azure pipelines, and potentially a future PyPI wheel-building service) to speed up releases and reduce grunt work. Also, this will especially be useful for scientific programmers, since they often create Python applications or libraries that include binaries written in other languages, and wheel distributions of those packages are prone to complication.
We need funding for backend development, hardware, testing, continuous integration platform services, technical writing for end users, project management, and community outreach.